I have an iMac with 998.28 GB of 999.86 available filled; but the file sizes listed in the Finder only add up to 218.66 GB. What gives? How do I clean out what I can't "see"?
David
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
David,
If you are like most users what is taking up hte most space is media such as photos, music and movies. Move those libraries to an external HD. Apple explains how to do this in these advise letters:
iTunes: How to move the library to an EHD
iMovie: How to move the Library to an EHD
Download Disk Inventory X and run it on your system. It'll show you what's taking so much room and then we can work out how to deal with it.
No, this is not the issue. I can see how big the library files are, and as I said in the original post, I can only account for ~200 of the 1000 GB disk space.
David
Mark,
Downloaded the software, and Disk Inventory ALSO only lists 189 GB on my home drive, while the disk "get info" says 998 GB used. I keep getting out of memory errors.
Additional suggestions?
David
If Disk Inventory X and Finder are giving such disparate results, there maybe directory problems. Have you tried running a disk repair utility on the drive? Do you have a bootable backup?
Have you tried emptying the OS X Trash icon in the Dock?
Trash is empty; I've done that lots of times as I've pulled other files (that I can see) off to try to make enough space to operate the computer.
I have not tried running disk repair. The system is backed up via Time Machine to an airport Time Capsule. Please forgive my ignorance; does that count as a bootable backup?
Time machine is not bootable. In order to have a bootable backup you would need a second EHD and use an app such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to create a bootable clone of the IMacs internal HD. This would be a very wise thing to do because only relying on one backup could be a faulty backup strategy, backups fail all the time!
I suggest getting an external hard drive and making a bootable clone. If the clone boots and all is well, format the internal drive and clone the clone back. You could also get Disk Warrior and run that on the drive and see if that fixes it.
Time Machine is OK as a secondary backup, but I’d never use it as the only backup. Bootable clones are the way to go because they’ll contain all your disk recovery utilities and you’ll have a choice of trying to repair the drive or just cloning back.
I have solved the problem, though not how I thought I would. I took the advice of rkaufmann87 and Mark P. and downloaded a copy of CCC. I already have an external hard drive I bought to make backups of this machine, but I hadn't formatted it correctly. When I kicked off the clone, I saw that there was a file on my son's account that was FAR larger than I thought anything on his ID was. It turns out that it was:
Ez7a.app/Contents/Resources/tempLog.txt
And this .txt file was OVER 700 GB!! I just nuked it and the software from the computer, and voila - problem gone. I couldn't see the size of this file in Disk Inventory - I guess because it was under another user's ID. Lessno learned - log onto EACH user's ID to check the size of the files. Unless someone has some advice on how to check files in other users' directories.
Thanks for the help, guys.
Maybe you should change your son's account from Administrator to Standard.
iMac disk full error; can't see files to clean up
