hard drive space comes and goes...

[AKAAM]

Has anyone run across their hard drive space being larger or smaller than what it says in the finder window? I've used mac the ripper to put dvds on the hard drive but lately I've seen some weird numbers. Before ripping I had about 14 gig free, but then after ripping I had 19. That obviously makes no sense.
Then later I had the opposite where I ripped and all my space went down from 12 to 3, even though the dvd was only about 5 gig.
The only other thing that might be involved is imovie. I imported a lot of video during this time. Wondering if it's taking time to register the amount?
Can anyone help?

[rumplestiltskin]

The Finder does take a few seconds (sometimes it takes a mouse-click in a Finder window if you've got another app in the foreground) to register that something has changed and the free space # to be updated.

There are also apps (like mac the ripper) that use temporary files. Occasionally, these apps do not exit gracefully and leave some detritus which, eventually, gets cleaned up with a restart or a "Repair Disk" in Disk Utility or even running the app which left the temp file in the first place (and it cleans up after itself).

There are also lots of temp files that OSX creates and deletes on its own (although not 5GB at a time).

It wouldn't hurt to boot from your system CD and run Disk Utility (both Repair Disk and Repair Permissions).

[AKAAM]

Ok, thanks! Did a disk repair (not from system disk though). Will try with another dvd and see if the same thing happens. If it does, I'll try out the repair ideas and let you know what the result is. thanks again!

[thoughton]

I partly agree with rump that it's the Finder causing problems, not MTR. OS X slowly builds up temporary files, when you restart you can sometimes regain as much as 3 or 4 GB. This is especially noticeable after playing some games for a few hours - Baldurs Gate 2 is particularly bad for this.

Also the Finder's updating mechanism to keep track of how much free space is left - it sucks. So does it's method of keeping track of 'last modified' dates. These take ages to update (and sometimes they never update unless you highlight the item in the Finder).

I dont think you have anything to worry about though, and I personally wouldnt bother with the hassle of booting from system CDs.

[AKAAM]

thanks for the advice. I've been using disk utility to check my actual space. I was mostly worried that there was a virus in the computer that was eating hard drive space (don't know if that's possible but I was concerned!). Thanks for the info guys.