Hi, wondered if anyone had ever come across the problem of disappearing hard drive space before, and if so, any ideas on what might help? My machine is a PowerMac G4, 512 MB Ram, dual 1Ghz processors, about 2 years old.

I was using Final Cut Pro 3.0.4, logging and capturing, had plenty disc space left - about 18GB. In midst of capturing a clip, a message came up "your start up disk is about to run out of space, please delete some files". FCP froze, had to do Force Quit.

Went to my hard disc, it was suddenly showing only just under 1GB of free space. There had been 18GB remaining before I started to capture the clip. The clip I was capturing was only about 200MB.

I backed up and deleted about 20GB of other files. The hard disc space free space reading went up to just over 20GB. Tried FCP again, log and capture showed 20GB free, tried to save clip. Same thing happened again. Now showing hard disc space of just under 1GB!

Deleted a bunch more files, but now seem to have only 2GB hard disc space, even though total files I have left on the disc take up only 35GB (out of 80GB disc).

I've tried Disk Verify and Disk Repair, Apple hardware tests, booting from the Install CD, no luck in restoring that hard disc space. Nothing showing up as an error on any Apple diagnostics.

Desktop seems a bit slow to load when restarted, but can't see any other symptoms.

Any ideas gratefully received by desperate film maker in London with deadline to produce a fund raising film for a homelessness charity - they have a fund raising event next week, and I don't want to let them down!

Thank you!

Using the Finder’s Go to Folder feature (in the Go menu), look at the sizes of the contents of these folders, by pasting in these pathnames:

/private/var/vm

/private/var/log

/Volumes

The /private/var/vm directory contains the swapfiles used by virtual memory. New ones are made as more data is swapped from RAM to the hard drive. The entire process of creating them begins at each reboot or restart. Check the total size of all the swapfiles, right after you boot, and as the disk fills up. In Panther, the first two swapfiles are 64MB, then each new one is twice the size of the preceeding one (128MB, 256MB, 512MB...).


If you do not run the daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance routines (either by using a utility, or by running the commands sudo perioidic daily, sudo perioidc weekly, and sudo periodic monthly in Terminal), you will accumulate too many logs. If an error is occurring frequently and is being logged, you can have a very large file at /private/var/log/system.log. I recently saw mention of a system.log file that was larger than 40 GB. See http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107388 for Apple’s explanation of the maintenance scripts and what utilities you can use to run them.


The files in /Volumes should be aliases to your mounted volumes. Do not remove these aliases, because anything you do to them happens to the contents of the corresponding volumes.

Simetimes, backup programs that cannot find an intended destination (or target) volume for a backup create a folder with the same name as the destination, and put the folder into the /Volumes directory. There are cases in which the entire startup volume has been backed up on itself, in a folder inside /Volumes. If the amount of missing space is about the size of your user folder, such a backup is likely to be the explanation. If you use Carbon Copy Cloner and have its preferences configured to create a backup on a schedule, and the intended destination volume is not mounted or is sleeping at the scheduled time, the backup is created in the /Volumes directory.

To check the size of the normally invisible /Volumes directory on the active startup volume, open a new Finder window. Select the startup volume in the list at the left, then choose column view (the one at the right of the three views). From the Finder’s Go menu, choose Go to Folder, and paste in:

/Volumes

The /Volumes directory becomes visible in the Finder; find its size by selecting it and typing Command I. My /Volumes directory is reported to be 12K.


Finally, try to determine where your various caches are. There may be files left over from burning CDs or DVDs. The One Step DVD option in iDVD has been reported to leave files in the directory /private/tmp.

WhatSize lists both visible and invisible files and sorts the search results by size.

Please see Why Defrag? for a description of the possible consequences (irreparable disk directory damage) of having any HFS+ volume too full, and the importance of having sufficient disk space that is both free and contiguous on each volume, a minimum of 15%.

Thanks for that, this was really illuminating, helped me to understand better how the MAC works.

I tried everything you suggested, and most things looked like they should, with the file sizes being the same as you suggested. The Volumes directory size was indeed 12K, as you suggested, so it doesn't look like an unintended back up was made.

The System Log files look like possible culprits - there are 8 versions, including 2 from today - and 7 of them are ZIP files - although the size shown by the Finders is small, I guess they could in fact be large files compressed.

I had a look at Terminal, and worked out how to type in the script to do the maintenance, but chickened out of making the changes, since I'm not that tech savvy, and reckoned I might do some damage if I got something wrong.

So, I'm going to leave the computer on all night, since the article you sent me to says that the computer will do the maintenance itself between 3 am and 5 am local time. Or I guess I could just change the time zone temporarily myself, and get it to do maintenance that way?

Either way, it's been really useful to get some more insight into how the MAC works. Will post back to let you know how it goes!

Meantime, will try saving video clips to an external hard disc and getting on with the edit that way.

Thank you!

You are welcome.

What is the size of the directory /private/var/log?

It is normal for the old logs to be compressed. Eventually, the oldest logs are deleted by the system.

If you prefer not to wait, open Terminal, located in /Applications/Utilities. Copy and then paste into the Terminal window the text on the following one line:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

Press the Return key, and enter your administrative password at the prompt. It may take a few minutes for the maintenance, and their is no indication of what progress is being made, except for the hard drive reading and writing.

do you have FileVault on? I've heard that creates large files. (I don't use it, myself.)

Did the Terminal maintenance, but gained only about 50 Mb of hard disk space freed up. The private/var/log folder is now only 7.8MB, so it looks like it's not the log files that had mopped up all that missing hard disk space. The mystery remains!

But I am able to do some editing meantime, by writing to an external hard disk. Hopefully the same errors won't occur again and mop up more disk space, while I try again to find out what the problem might be.

Thanks for the help - I realise now that I've relied a lot on the MAC's user friendliness, and don't know too much about how it works - but then, so far, this is the first major thing to go wrong!

You are welcome.

Check the size of /private/var/vm and also try to determine if Final Cut Pro creates large files in a cache when it works.

Hi

The var/vm folder is 64MB in size, so it's not hiding the missing disk space. I checked and emptied the Final Cut Pro cache, that had about 3GB of render files, but that would be typical from old projects, not new from today.

So it's still as mysterious as the missing matter in the universe (though there is a doc due on UK television this week which claims it will explain where that is!)

did you try WhatSize?

One of the other posters sent me a link to What Size, but the site wasn't operating. Do you have a recent link?