Shrinking Hard Drive

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Over the summer I had roughly 225G of a 500G HD left. Then I dropped below 200 which was due to alot of image scanning and adding photos and getting Aperture. But after this about for the past 6 weeks or so my hard drive has been steadily shrinking by itself to the point where I can watch it drop while I am not physically doing anything. I did some looking into it and found that its happened to other people and that it may be due to a growing error log file? I used Grand Perspective to find out that a couple of the largest unknown files are 'private/var/log/kernel.log.0' weighing in at 57.5G! and the smaller private/var/log/kernel.log.1' at 9.33G and private/var/vm/sleepimage' at 4G. What are these and can they be trashed and what can I do before I completely run out of hard drive space?
I was down as far as 137G as of yesterday and after a restart I'm back up slightly to 142G...
 
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Hmmm.... I used Console to read the kernal logs and '0' consists of a repetition of the following:
Oct 16 11:57:11 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: restarting journal replay (74832896 - 76141056)!
Oct 16 11:57:11 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: replay_journal: from: 74832896 to: 7em.fs] [DevNode devfs] [MountPt /dev] [Path /dev/disk2s2] [FSLogMsgID 387462648] [FSLogMsgOrder Last]
Oct 16 11:57:11 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x5
Oct 16 11:57:11 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: replay_journal: Could not read block list header strategy err 0x5
Oct 16 11:57:11 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: replay_journal: Could not read block list header block @ 0x475dc00!
Oct 16 11:57:11 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: restarting journal replay (74832896 - 76141056)!

and the smaller number 1:

err 0x5
Oct 4 17:52:19 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: replay_journal: Could not read block list header block @ 0x475dc00!
Oct 4 17:52:19 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: restarting journalSLogMsgOrder First]
Oct 4 17:52:19 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x5
Oct 4 17:52:19 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: replay_journal: Could not read block list header block ] [LBlkNum 205670] [FSLogMsgID 277160645] [FSLogMsgOrder First]
Oct 4 17:52:19 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x5
Oct 4 17:52:19 brendan-t-burkes-macbook-pro kernel[0]: jnl: disk2s2: replay_journal: Could not read block list header block @ 0x475dc00!

I think that these are related to a couple of restarts that did not go correctly. I had to do a hard restart with the power key. So, two questions, anyone have an idea of what these kernel panics are about and can I just dump the logs?
 
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Change a partition? I don't want to format my drive, just find out why if I can dump these log files... Been trying Terminal right now but it doesn't seem to be working for me.
I thought that it was:
cd /private/var/log
sudo rm -i kernel.log.1
but Terminal just says no such file or directory...?
 
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Never mind... I deleted that one and got the 10G back, now for the '0' one.
 

bobtomay

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Your Mac's Specs
15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
The sleep image one is normal at 3-4GB after you've been booted up for awhile. That's the file that allows the machine to go to sleep and then wake up in the same place.

You should be able to delete both of the log files - but I would use Onyx to do it.

Since you've done some hard restarts and those particular errors, I'd also boot up with your OS X disc and run the Repair Permissions and Repair Drive from Disk Utility.
 
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Thanks, Bobtomay. I did and recovered some 70G all told! I think that I'll do that, but what is Onyx?
 
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Never mind again, I think that I found it and it looks like a handy app. Thanks again!
 

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