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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Hard drive space

poetguy - May 20, 2007 - 9:14 pm

I opened iStat to check on the space on my hard drive and found 28 GB used, 10 unused. I thought I should have lots more space since my biggest folder—my iTunes library--is on an external drive. So I ran 2 programs--Disk Inventory X and WhatSize--that show exactly what is on the drives. They both confirmed what I saw in iStat. When I looked for more specific info from the apps, I found that the big ticket items--applications, system, etc.-- take up maybe 13-15GB, but everything else is peanuts. So, if you add the 10GB free space with the 15GB, that means that I have about 12-13 GB space unaccounted for. Do I have the math right, or is there some other very large file(s) that are hidden or for some reason do not show up on these drive inventories.

Thanks for your help.

mdnky - May 20, 2007 - 9:38 pm

Check your user folder {/MacHD/users/username} and see how big that guy is. Those folders can get big after a few months . . . kinda sneaks up on you from normal use. Having 10+GB in small files is very possible nowadays.

Also, iTunes has been known to reset the default location of media after updates. So you may have newer music and stuff being stored on the main drive now and not know it.

poetguy - May 21, 2007 - 8:20 am

Thanks for the speedy reply. The Users folder was already calculated in my figures. My 2 hd scans gave the same figures:
Users-6.5
Applications-3.9
Library-1.5
System-1.1
Private-1.2
Those are the top 5. The next larges folders are:
usr-441MB
System Folder-227
Previous system folder-194
After those, it drops down to 40MB for TheFindByContentFolder, then to 19.8MB for gmon.out.

Do these numbers tell you something that they're not telling me? I will check out your suggestion about iTunes resetting the default location. In the meantime, I wanted to get this numbers to you to see what you think.

Thanks for your help.

mdnky - May 21, 2007 - 8:03 pm

Come to think of it if iTunes did reset the default location, it would have been under your music folder which is under users. So that's probably not an issue then.

Have you ever had any programs like Virtual PC installed?

poetguy - May 23, 2007 - 9:16 am

Nopel. No Virtual PC installed. Any other programs that might be hogs yet not show up in my inventories? Would you help you if I sent you the a list of what's my hd? Or a report from WhatSize?

I appreciate your help.

poetguy - May 23, 2007 - 9:18 am

I apologize for the sloppy mistakes. Here is a corrected version:

Nope. No Virtual PC installed. Any other programs that might be hogs yet not show up in my inventories? Would it help you if I sent you a list of what's on my hd? Or a report from WhatSize?