Available space on my hard drive

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Hi all

I have a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac. I have about 20GB of music on it, and about 10GB of photographs in iPhoto. Apart from that I have just a few Word and Excel files, and I don't have any games or social networking apps, or anything much to be honest.

Recently when downloading photos, I have been getting messages telling me that my disk is full.

I have looked in the Disk Utility, and it tells me that of the 232.9 GB capacity, I have used 230GB and have only 2.5GB of space left. It also tells me that there 162,000 folders on my hard drive, with 640,000 files. Whaaaa?

This happened a few months ago and when I rebooted, it cleared the problem and my free space returned to what I would expect. This time, that hasn't happened.

There may be an obvious reason for this, but it is a bit worrying.

Anybody got any ideas?

Thanks so much.
 
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Run repair disk permissions ..
yourHD>Applications>utilities>disk utilities

In the right column click your hard drive and then repair disk permissions ...

Post back if it doesnt work

Cheers
 
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Hi

Thanks for replying so quickly. I tried what you suggested, the result of which was that my available space dropped to 1.8GB! After rebooting, it went back up to 2.5GB again, so no joy, I' m afraid

:(
 

bobtomay

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If you'd really like to know where your disk space is being used I recommend Whatsize. While not free, it is inexpensive and imho, the best of the lot.
 
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G;day and welcome to the forums.

Perhaps the drive IS running out of space.

Any hard drive requires a minimum of some 15% free space in order to work anywhere near efficiently. If you are within that 15% you will get problems. Maybe it is time for either a bigger internal drive, or an external drive and move all those photos and that music across.
 
OP
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G'day to you and Happy New Year!

Thing is, I just can't believe there is any way I am so close to capacity.

I mean, 162,000 folders containing 640,000 files? Where are they? How can I find these folders so that I can attempt to delete them?

When I go to the Finder and click on Macintosh HD, at the bottom it says 5 items, 3.31GB available.

The 5 items are Applications, Library, System, User Guides and information, Users

By right clicking on each one, and selecting "Get Info", I discover that the size of each are:

Applications: 46.53GB
Library: 8.29GB
System: 4.33GB
User Guides: 4KB
Users: 23.28GB

These add up to 82GB; my hard drive should have 232GB - so why is there only 3.31GB of available space?

Grrr!!
 

chscag

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Did you follow the advice given you by bobtomay? If you don't want to use the program he recommended and would rather try one that's free, go here to download "Disk Inventory X".

Regards.
 
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Thank you, yes I did, and after installing Disk Inventory X, I found there was a folder on my hard drive named "Private" which was full of .asl files, and was 144.7 GB in size.

I then did a bit of googling on .asl files, and just in case anyone else has this problem, I found the solution here:

aslmanager taking up 99% of CPU | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews

Now I have 147GB left which is more or less what I would expect.

So thanks for all your advice folks, for now at least, I seem to have the problem solved.....
 

Slydude

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Wow that was a real puzzler thanks for the heads up and for posting the link.
 
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Hm, doesn't appear to have completely resolved the problem though... a week or so later and that folder has already built back up to 4.6GB. So I may have to repeat the process every once in a while to keep emptying the folder.

If this is an issue with the aslmanager as suggested, hopefully future updates of OS X will resolve it....
 

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