Thanks, Bill!
I tried running the daily, weekly and monthly maintenance routines,
but to no avail. So I made the hidden files visible again and checked
further to see where that 135GB lives. This is the path:
private/var/log/asl/
I started going through them in search of a very large file, but there
are 2,059 files there! They all have names that appear to include
dates, i.e., 2012.03.23.U501.asl. It says they are Adobe Photoshop
styles files, and they go all the way back to Feb., 2010. Some of them
have an additional 10 digits after "asl." and those appear to be
larger files - in the vicinity of 350MB each. Do you know if I can
delete these files?
Many thanks for your help!
Wendi
On Mar 22, 2012, at 12:00 PM, <[email protected]
> <[email protected]> wrote:
From: Bill Rising <[email protected]>
Date: March 21, 2012 12:42:40 PM GMT-04:00
To: Topics related to Apple and Macintosh computers <[email protected]
>
Subject: Re: [MacGroup] Full Hard Drive
Reply-To: Topics related to Apple and Macintosh computers <[email protected]
>
On Mar 21, 2012, at 11:24 , Wendi Williams wrote:
Hi, Group,
On my work computer, the 250GB hard drive is very full - I'm down
to about 17GB left. But when I looked at the contents of the drive,
they only add up to about 75GB. So I figured out how to make the
hidden files show up, and the culprit seems to be a hidden folder
named "private" which weighs in at over 135GB. Does anyone know
what this folder is for, and if it should really be that big? It
just seems odd that system files would take up that much space.
The /private directory has a couple of things which can take up
space (thought 135GB is a lot).
1. The system /tmp directory which has temp files in it.
2. The /var/folders directory where your temp files go. You might
have an application leaving a bunch of temp files behind. Though
this shouldn't happen, because the application should clean up after
itself, it can happen if there if there are application crashes. If
you open the terminal and put in the command
getconf DARWIN_USER_TEMP_DIR
you will see where your temp folder is (it will be listed as /var/
folders/<some big mess>)
Try checking it to see if it has a bunch of old files in it. If so,
try running the following command in the Terminal (scarfed from http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html)
:
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
and give your password. This will do the garbage collection that
should happen in the middle of the night (I can't remember if
anything more than -daily- gets run when you reboot).
3. the /var/vm folder which has all your computers swap files and
sleepimages. When I have many applications open (esp. virtual
machines of some sort), the swap files can grow to 4-5GB in size.
Others will have more suggestions and advice, I'm sure.
Bill
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