hi forum,

I'm wondering if anyone can help?

I have an iBook with a small, but sufficient hard drive of 28GB (I use external hard drives when I'm recording in Cubase or working with big files).

The problem is, even though my applications and iTunes(under User) only take up 10GB, since everything else is on the external hard drives, my hard drive says I'm using 27GB in total. That's 17GB unaccounted for! It was ok when it was 3-4GB, but 17 seems a bit much. Do I need to reinstall, or is it something wrong with my systems folder?

Any help would be REALLY appreciated, I've had this problem for the past year now!

Thanks...

what is the ibook and what is the system Mac Os 9 Or 10.?
also you have to look at the size of the different subFolders in the system folder and then only one can think to do a diagnosis

I agree with Mathologie; we need a little more information. If on OSX, there is a chance that your log files in your system folder are the culprits. My MBP seems to have an issue with making huge log files which I periodically clear out. (I also found I had 2Gb of Podcasts recently, which surprised me!)

Let us know a little more information and we will try to help. You could start by going through your folders (on all user accounts) and seeing which are especially bigger than you might expect.

Keith

Could be fragmentation and remnants of old files, but it's far more likely to be just the scratch disk space needed for your system and applications to work. Have you upgraded your ram recently? Ram typically needs roughly 3 times the amount of harddisk space spare as a swap file. 1gb ram=3gb space needed 3gb=9gb needed. BUT thats just for the system to operate efficiently so it will usually allow you to right to it...up to a point.

How about vst plugs etc.? where are you keeping them? they could be in the library folder that is in the root level of your harddrive, rather than the one in your user directory and some of those babies are have HUGE sample sets to make them work. Also... is this number 27gb consistent or does it change during operation? Some applications need their own scratch space to work... Photoshop is a major culprit in this department.

So yes some more info would help us to nail this problem down for you.

The other day at my day job, I was astonished to be working in PhotoShop only to find that I could not save a file because of a memory error. Knowing all about Scratch Disks, etc. from both music and graphics work, I took a look at the system drive. It showed an available amount of disk space at less than 1 Megabyte. What I found was a single file that was over 9 Gigs! It was a Microsoft Office Database file. If you're using Microsoft Office, apparently this file can get huge.

HTH.

Roger

What
tool programs do you use?

Please try
Applejack
http://applejack.sourceforge.net/

opensource

After installing it

use it in single user mode
by restarting and holding down [apple] [S]

use the deep cleaning mode
by typing
applejack AUTO restart

this will deep clean your temp files
and also help
rewrite your permissions
(better IMHO then apple's disk utility)

it will help out

I alway reccomend this faor all my mac friends

I like it

it may help
ArchivalAudio
aka
-- Ian

First max your ram if it isn't the case already, a laptop is more efficient with as much ram as it can host. (more ram = less swap in fact)

You must have caches and temp fils bloating space. Regular OnyX or Applejack use can help keep thing tidy and unbloated. Note that Applejack still doesn't work in Leopard AFAIK.

Check if you don't have loads of printer drivers, localisation files of software bloating space. Printer direvers are installed by default by OS X save if you tell it not so… There are utilities to remove unwanted languages files. All this can free more than a GB.

Mind that drives are getting cheaper…

I stand corrected, don't know what I was thinking there with the swap sizes, I guess it goes back to when I didn't have enough ram to hold the huge photoshop files that I was running. Photoshop uses ram in A different way to audio apps from what you say lepetitmartien glad to know that.. If you open a 10000x10000 pixel(100megapixel) file in photoshop which I have just done on my machine; a G5 with 4gb of ram you gat a file that is 286mb but has a scratch file of over 900mb, now Photoshop has always been a memory hog and has also always handled memory in a different way to OSX but its good to know that Logic or DAW's don't pull the same trick.

cheers

Thanks,

A friend tried applejack recently on it and it didn't seem to free up any more space than was available before we did it. Having said that, there's even less available memory than there was at that time.

Should I try it again, or will rebooting help? I have 2 external hard drives already ...it's true, they're cheap, but it's a pain that now all I have on my internal drive is my iTunes, and even with that i keep having to delete stuff if i don't want my "start-up disk" to be "almost full" . The iBook's days are numbered it would seem, pity coz I don't really want to buy a new computer just yet.... does this sort of thing happen with age perhaps? I've had it since March, 2005.

Cheers... any tips welcome!

OK... some more info coming up....

processor: 1.2 GHz PowerPC G4
memory: 768 MB DDR SDRAM

And the internal hard drive is 27.82 GB apparently. I'm presently using 26.84 (28,816,822,272 bytes), though to be honest, having gone through all my applications, folders etc, I'm only using just over 10GB!

Thanks already for that stuff about scratch disks... I have got microsoft office on this and have been using it quite heavily recently. How do I sort that out then, if that is the problem - access and delete those files??

Cheers,
Alex

Oh, sorry forgot to say it's OSX 10.4.11

....which big cat is that anyway, I get them all confused