What's taking up all that space?

Hi, everyone.
I seem to have encountered a slight problem...

Ok, so, I have one 200G HD in my iMac G5 which is divided into (roughly) 15G, 6G, and 170G partitions; The 15G one is home to my OS, the 6G one is used as a repair partition to fix my OS on the 15G if it gets buggy, and the large partition holds everything else: Apps, data, etc. The reason for this is that if I ever need to reformat (god forbid) and reinstall my OS from scratch, I can just wipe the 15G partition and all of my data is safe (well that's the plan, anyways).

The problem is that I’ve run out of room on my 15G partition, despite the fact that I store nothing there... I've made aliases in my home folder which lead to the correct folders in my storage partition; the only files that are there are the System ones, the Library, and the User ones I couldn't relocate (i.e.: User Library).

So, my question is this: What's hogging the space? Are there invisible files that just keep getting bigger? Could my preferences and/or other Library files be growing exponentially? Often I even get the "Startup Disk Full" alert. I don't know what to look for to remedy the problem, nor what I could erase (I obviously don't want to start tinkering around with sys files)...

If anyone has any advice, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Cheers

Some good apps to start with is WhatSize and also Disk Inventory X. That will be best way to see what the problem is.

iWhat said:

Some good apps to start with is WhatSize and also Disk Inventory X. That will be best way to see what the problem is.

Click to expand...

Thanks, these are 2 great Apps. I see that a lot of the space taken up is by Garage band loops and whatnot in my Apps Support folder in my Library. Also, I have a bunch of swapfiles in HD/Private/var/vm. What are these files? is it safe to erase them?

No: those are your virtual memory files. They are automatically managed & deleted by the system as needed.

Ok. Also, sometimes when my Mac has been on for a while and I've been using lots of apps, I get the Startup Disk Full alert. Is this due to the fact that temp files or scratch disks are taking up the small amount of available space?

You can move the Garageband loops and instruments to your other partition: You'll just have to manually add them to Garageband again afterwards.

Garageband 3 actually asks you during installation where you want to put those files.

You might also want to run a system maintenance tool (like OnyX) to see if there are any system logs etc. that could be hogging space.

Yeah, I'm moving them now, I'll save so much space!
Thanks, I just downloaded OnyX, ll be sure to check that out