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Ok, so my Macbook was getting low on space but I still had a few gigs left. I wanted to show the first episode of this anime to a friend, so I grabbed a big torrent intending to only have it download the first file. I believe my error occurred due to it attempting to allocate the full space for the torrent before I could tell it not to download all files. In any case, here's my situation now:

The df command shows 100% usage with about 900mb free. I've deleted a good 20-30 gigs of junk and this does not change. I went through Vuze and told it to delete the torrent AND all data. My drive is still full. In the Activity Monitor, under disk utilization, there are two "disks" in a drop down -- "Macintosh HD" and my user account. The results for Macintosh HD are similar to what is shown by the df command. The info for the user account shows usage of over 400gigs when my drive is only a 250.

So it seems no matter how much I delete, it stays full. Anyone got a clue what I should do? Thanks.

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I presume you emptied the trash? – Richard Hoskins Sep 23 '09 at 16:17
Can you post the output here of: "df -h", "du -sh ~/.Trash" – Doug Harris Sep 23 '09 at 17:09
Possible dupe? superuser.com/questions/8377/… – Doug Harris Sep 23 '09 at 17:12
Macintosh:~ me$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/disk0s2 220Gi 219Gi 255Mi 100% / devfs 109Ki 109Ki 0Bi 100% /dev fdesc 1.0Ki 1.0Ki 0Bi 100% /dev map -hosts 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% /net map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% /home /dev/disk1s2 465Gi 465Gi 223Mi 100% /Users/me Macintosh:~ me$ du -sh .Trash 0B .Trash – Noobed It Up Sep 23 '09 at 17:44
/dev/disk0s2 220Gi 219Gi 255Mi 100% / /dev/disk1s2 465Gi 465Gi 223Mi 100% /Users/me – Noobed It Up Sep 23 '09 at 17:45
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5 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

I would personally go to the download directory and just double check that you have actually deleted it and if it is not there, check the recycle bin or whatever it is called on a mac. When I use Utorrent, if I tell it to delete something, it will actually move it to recycle bin and not delete it all together (has saved me a few times!)

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I've been through and through my downloads directory, ensuring everything is gone. Trash is empty. Disk usage according to the command du appears accurate and is shrinking as I delete stuff. I did most of my deleting from the command line, so it didn't end up in the trash, which is definitely empty. – Noobed It Up Sep 23 '09 at 16:31
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You could try booting into safe mode - hold down shift when you turn the computer on. On the login box it will tell you are in safe mode, and there's no core image, so animations are all choppy.

Try the same commands here, it clears caches and various other things, so on a reboot to normal mode things might be fixed.

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Thanks for the suggestion. I forgot to mention in my previous posts that I have tried rebooting normally, but never into safe mode. I'll give it a whirl. – Noobed It Up Sep 23 '09 at 16:59
after booting into safe boot, things look the same. I'll add that du -sh /Users/me shows 97gb, which is what I would expect. There is no other account using any space on the machine. I should have tons of disk space. – Noobed It Up Sep 23 '09 at 18:03
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Us a program like WhatSize or Disk Inventory X to see what's taking up your space.

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You've got directory corruption and probably massive disk fragmentation which will impact in performance and may make the mac unstable.

Boot from the system disks, run disk utility and repair the disk. If it fails either buy Diskwarrior (approx $100) or reinstall the OS (archive and install in Leopard or just a straight upgrade in Snowie).

Tackling the defragmentation either buy iDefrag or if you have an external HD - clone the drive using SuperDuper or Carbon Cloner, write out your Macbook HD using Disk Utility and clone the drive back.

If you've already got an up to date Time Machine backup, just clean install OS and restore.

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It sounds like you're using FileVault to encrypt the contents of your home directory. That's why your home directory shows up as another volume, and also why you appear to be taking up much more space than the actual size of your hard drive. It's also probably why you can't recover free space, as FileVault only frees up space from deleted files when you restart. So restarting should recover that free space.

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