Just lost over 20 gigs of HD space....help

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Level 2

200 points

Just lost over 20 gigs of HD space....help

I had an external FW drive connected to my Laptop and was working on some Photoshop stuff.

I have about 24 gigs of space left on my Laptop HD. The FW drive had about 20+ gigs of material on it.

The drive kept unmounting and an alert told me to reformat the FW drive. I took it to my iMac and backed it up and then reformatted and put the material back on it ... no problem so far.

I go back to my laptop and start working on the photoshop stuff again and all of a sudden I have 800megs left on my laptop HD. I have NO idea how or where the space got taken up.

Maybe the contents of the FW drive got put into a cache somewhere?

I tried using CLEAN MY MAC but that didn't clean out any space.

Something happened and now my HD is almost full and i have NO idea what happened.

Anyone have ANY clue how to figure out how to find out where the space went or how to fix it?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2007 Model

Posted on Jan 26, 2014 9:11 PM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Jan 27, 2014 9:47 AM in response to Dallas Kruse

This program may help you see what is taking up drive space.

http://download.cnet.com/mac/id-design/3260-20_4-6285025-1.html?osNamesExact=Mac +OS+X+10.6

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Answer 2

Jan 28, 2014 10:31 AM in response to Eric Root

This might sound overly simple, but open a new finder window and put it in list view with Date Modified selected at the top. Then just move through major folders to see what was added. You could also try switching from Date Modfied to Size since this is a big chunk of data obviously. See if that allows you to find where this data came from and you can then compare to your HDD. Again, not super technical, but since there haven't been many responses, I figured I'd throw it out there as an option.

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Answer 3

Dallas Kruse Author

Level 2

200 points

Jan 28, 2014 6:11 PM in response to Danielmak

When I quit out of Photoshop, I got all the space back.

When i opened PS back up, a myriad of gigs was missing again. There must be a cache that photoshop was holding.

I tried to "PURGE" from the edit window but it was greyed out. So, I tossed that PS file and started over. All is back again.

That was weird. And scary.

Thanks for the replies

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