Lost Disk Space?

Hello to everyone from a 1st time poster.

I've just started using a old iMac at home running OS X 10.4 and I have to say that I'm puzzled as to where my disk space has gone.
I'm new to Macs so please bear with me on this one ...

After trying to upload some video I discovered that my filesystem /dev/disk0s3 mounted on route is very close to being full (98% full) having used (apparently) 111Gb or a 114 Gb hard drive, this is also reflected if I do a df -g from a terminal window.

But if I drill into / and do a ls -l (a ls -al indicates just over 10000 files) I see a total of 9746 files of which only 25 or so are listed, the biggest being mach_kernel (4Mb). Anyway, however I look at the files and directories I can't get it to total anywhere near 111Gb, more like 40Gb. This has been confirmed after I ran both Disk Inventory X and Omnisweeper, both of which showed a total used disk space of 40Gb.

So my question is where and how to I find out where the other 74Gb has "gone". The attached screenshot shows a terminal window indicating the near full / and high level displays with Disk Inventory X.


Many thanks for your time reading this, I'm sure it's something simple!


TB.

It looks like you've checked everywhere EXCEPT within your various folder, and most suspect /users/YOURUSERNAME folder .

doing a ls -al on / is misleading, as it won't report the size of the contents WITHIN a subdirectory - all of those entries that start with a d (where it shows for example drwxr-xr-x like for System) - those are directories. Your system folder is DEFINITELY not 136 bytes big. And it looks like in your screen cap of the inventory, you're only looking at startup folders and apps, but not your actual personal home folder.

The OS itself doesn't take much space, 4-6 gigs ish. Depending on what apps you have installed, you might expand that to your 40 gigs (like I know some games can take 10-15gig alone)

I've never used that app before, but see if you can get it to point to your home folder - that's my guess as to where your space has gone - you might have some files taking it all.

I know go into a terminal, and do a du -h (which by default will give me the size of everything in my home folder in human readable terms) the very last line shows:

239G .

Which tells me my home folder contains 239 gigs worth of stuff; which is the vast majority of the 299.62 gigs that are used on my system (I have multiple VM's on my machine that are between 40 and 100 gigs each)

I can't guarantee that you have something in your home folder that is taking all your space, but to be honest, that's the first place I'd check.

Many thanks for your reply Nethfel, the offending files were actually in the usr directory of my wifes account. Three copies of a 29Gb avi file plus various other biggies.

Thanks again.

TB.

No problem, just glad you found the problem. It's really easy to get some really large files. I know when I do video editing, I have to make sure to clean up after myself when I'm done =)