My hard disk suddenly filled up and I can't find the files
that are causing my hard disk to fill up. I was watching some videos that was on an external drive on my computer using vlc. I finished one movie (.avi file) and then tried to watch the second one in the series. However, the vlc application would not open it. I tried several times. I gave up and tried opening it with the quicktime player. Even though it opened, I got a message that my startup disk was full. That was strange because I am sure I had about 20GB as I was keeping a close eye on my hard disk capacity. I had recently deleted many video files and so I had a rough idea of how much hard disk I should have.
Anyway, I deleted some movie files to make space and then I checked my hard disk with Disk Inventory X.
When I did that, I found some strange files.
There are some temp files some of which are 1GB. The path is private/var/vm/tmp. One file is labeled a Quick Time player launcher document.
Another one is called "sleepimage". Format is HFS+. It is 4GB. It was modified recently (yesterday). Its path is private/var/vm/sleepimage.
I don't want to delete anything important by accident.
I just think this is strange and want to find these files but when I click "Open", it says I don't have permission and I have to locate them in Finder. However, when I type "sleepimage" in Finder, nothing comes up.
I really want to get rid of any files that take up a lot of space on my computer and that shouldn't be there. Do you think this is some kind of virus? And that's why my computer is filling up with some strange files. There are also many swapfile documents that are 1GB in size.
MBA v 3.2, 256GB SSD, 2.13GHz, 4GB-OTHER, Other OS, 10.6.8