OT: how to reclaim lost disc space?

[schmeg]

The remaining available space on the Mac I use for disc ripping is slowly decreasing. Should be 25 GB free; now there's less than 9 GB. Has the latest OSX version, is mostly used for web browsing and miscellaneous word-processing in addition to DVD processing.

I can't find any clear signs of huge files left abandoned somewhere. The behavior is more like some files being generated little by little and not deleted. Available disc space decreases only a little bit at a time, not 4.37 GB worth.

I ran Norton Disk Doctor, and it fixed several errors, but didn't reclaim any space.

Any advice about how to investigate where the space has gone, and how to retrieve it? Any reliable freeware out there?

ALSO: a recommended delocalizer?

ALSO: Finder doesn't automatically update remaining disc space on my hard drive, although it does on my FireWire drives. Emptying Trash seems to be the best way to correct the disc space number. Is there some easy tweak to get this to be more consistently correct?

[Frobozz]

There's an article about this on today's home page at www.macfixit.com.

[londor]

Use OmniDiskSweeper to check what is taking up the space in your HD.

[sjk]

There's an article about this on today's home page at www.macfixit.com.

Or try this article permalink. I just wrote the "Toast 6 - disk space usage" comment there with some explanation of my observations about that topic. It may not apply to schmeg's situation since s/he's noticing space decreasing less rapidly.

WhatSize seems to be a reasonable freeware alternative to OmniDiskSweeper.

[thoughton]

The remaining available space on the Mac I use for disc ripping is slowly decreasing. Should be 25 GB free; now there's less than 9 GB. Has the latest OSX version, is mostly used for web browsing and miscellaneous word-processing in addition to DVD processing.

I can't find any clear signs of huge files left abandoned somewhere. The behavior is more like some files being generated little by little and not deleted. Available disc space decreases only a little bit at a time, not 4.37 GB worth.

I ran Norton Disk Doctor, and it fixed several errors, but didn't reclaim any space.

Any advice about how to investigate where the space has gone, and how to retrieve it? Any reliable freeware out there?

ALSO: a recommended delocalizer?

ALSO: Finder doesn't automatically update remaining disc space on my hard drive, although it does on my FireWire drives. Emptying Trash seems to be the best way to correct the disc space number. Is there some easy tweak to get this to be more consistently correct?

Possibly a stupid question, but have you restarted your Mac recently? I generally reclaim 8 or 9 gigs each time I restart (about once a month).

PS the culprit could be almost anything. I know for a fact that the Baldur's Gate II game cache files can grow to around 4gig, and it never gets reclaimed until you reboot.

[thoughton]

PPS: You can force the finder to update the 'available disk space' info by viewing the root folder of that HD (i.e. just click on the HD name in your sidebar, or desktop if you use desktop icons)

[Mark V]

Possibly a stupid question, but have you restarted your Mac recently? I generally reclaim 8 or 9 gigs each time I restart (about once a month).

Do you really leave you computer on that long?

[schmeg]

There's an article about this on today's home page at www.macfixit.com.

Or try this article permalink. I just wrote the "Toast 6 - disk space usage" comment there with some explanation of my observations about that topic. It may not apply to schmeg's situation since s/he's noticing space decreasing less rapidly.

SJK, I'd encourage you to post those comments here. The MacFixIt link has now aged to subscription-only access... I do indeed use Toast 6.0.7 for burning.

And thanks for the tip, thoughton. That's ever so slightly quicker than my make-a-folder-and-trash-it alternative. Great!

This Mac does get shut off each night.

I'll try one of the disc-space utilities and delocalize, and see how that improved things. Thanks for your help, all.

[dnix71]

Thanks for the tip on WhatSize. 359 MB of demo Garage band songs! I don't even use that app.

[sjk]

SJK, I'd encourage you to post those comments here. The MacFixIt link has now aged to subscription-only access... I do indeed use Toast 6.0.7 for burning.

Thanks for reminding me about that aged MacFixIt link. I don't have a MFI subscription (which is one reason I don't often contribute there) but this time I remembered to keep a copy of my post:

Toast 6 - disk space usage

Authored by: sjk on Tuesday, March 01 2005 @ 10:24 PM PST

Another space-stealing culprit can be temporary files created by Roxio Toast that aren't automatically removed. Places to check are under the Temporary Items directory at the root of mounted volumes and the Roxio Converted Items directory. The latter's location can be changed under the Converted Items tab of Preferences. There's a dropdown menu for selecting when items are to be automatically delete and also a Delete Converted Items Now button to do it immediately. However, the button won't delete items created during the current Toast (6.0.9) session, only after it's restarted. That becomes significant when burning to a shared recorder. Images copied to the remote system will accumulate in its converted items directory and aren't deleted when Toast quits, even with a When Toast Quits setting for the Delete Converted Items preference. Now that I've observing that behavior consistently for several weeks I'll be reporting it to Roxio.

Hopefully that's helpful disk space management information for other Toast users.

I haven't gotten around to checking Roxio's forum for reports about that non-deletion of images copied to a shared burner host's Roxio Converted Items directory, which I want to do before reporting it. If anyone here can confirm it that could be helpful.

I'll try one of the disc-space utilities and delocalize, and see how that improved things.

I don't remember the details but I've read delocalizing can cause certain apps to misbehave, e.g. Safari when used in combination with some third party "enhancer" package. Probably wise to have a strategy for reverting to a pre-delocalized state in case something goes wrong.

[paleintruder]

I had the same problem, I think. It started after I upgraded to 10.3.8. Everytime I would do anything I would lose storage space. Most of the time it would create these gigantic (5-30 GB!) log files. It was user corruption. You can either start a new user and migrate files over from your old user via the shared user (but not the library log files!) or you can reinstall the system and erase. I struggled with it for a while with Disk Warrior, Norton, etc. and eventually I just reinstalled. I am no longer having the problem.

[thoughton]

Possibly a stupid question, but have you restarted your Mac recently? I generally reclaim 8 or 9 gigs each time I restart (about once a month).

Do you really leave you computer on that long?

I never turn my computer off. (For one thing, OS X's shutdown and startup routine is too flippin' sloooooow). In fact, apart from the rare occasions when I take it on a plane (it's a laptop), I don't think I've ever powered down!

[Ladd]

Do you really leave you computer on that long?

I rarely shut down my Mac -- I either put it to sleep manually or let it go to sleep automatically after 1 hour. It is probably restarted about once a month after a software install or when I want to fiddle around with something inside the computer itself.

All the fans stop and the drives cease spinning when the computer sleeps, so it is completely silent. Given that waking up from sleep allows me to back up and running in about 15 seconds vs a couple of minutes for a cold boot, that is my choice for saving electricity and enjoying the silence.

I've had one hard crash in the exactly two years I've had this particular Mac, running 16-24 hours per day. Can't say that about the ol' 8500 running 8.x through 9.x. (which I always shut down because the fans kept spinning even when put to sleep).

Mirror Drive Door dual 1.25GHz G4, 2 GB RAM, started with OS X 10.3.4 now at 10.3.8