iMac hard drive nearly full???

I recently discovered that my iMac's hard drive is nearly full, which doesn't make any sense to me. It has a capacity of about 250 GBs, and I've apparently used a little more than 230 GBs somehow -- and that's after deleting about 15 GBs of files and junk and whatnot yesterday that I knew about that I didn't think I really needed anymore.

I've had it since 2008, and just a year or two ago, the last time I remember specifically checking, the hard drive was only about half full. Certainly I had at least 100 GBs of free space the last time I checked.

I have a lot of pictures and video saved for my work, but really that's only about 25 GBs at this point, and does not amount for the rapid use of space in just the last year.

Could I have something malicious from outside storing data or some shit on my iMac somehow? I always thought iMacs were basically impervious to that kind of thing.

How would I go about zeroing in on a hidden folder or something that is storing a shitload of junk that I'm unaware of, or otherwise figure our what's eating up so much space all of a sudden? In my mind I should still have about 50 to 100 additional GBs of free space remaining at this time.

Thanks for any help!

:cool

 

You may want to check out this page about disk space analyzers for Mac OSX.

 

Are you using final cut? The scratch disk folder will often contain many imported videos, even ones you arent meaning to keep.

 

Hey i am not sure what is causing your hard drive to fill up, but I can probably help you find out!

1.Go to your desktop and open any normal folder (not a system folder)
2.Right click (or control+left click) on some white space inside this folder
3.Click on "Show View Options"
4.At the bottom of the box that appears, select the box that says "Calculate all sizes"
5.Now, go to you top level directory....this is the folder that CONTAINS the Users, Applications, System, Library, and other folders.
6.You should be able to now see the sizes of these folders, and track down what exactly is using up all of that space.

Good hunting, and let me know if this fixed your issue!

 

Well, the funny thing is, just a day or two after I started this post all of a sudden I had 119 GBs of free space again!

I don't know if it was something I did somehow (no way did I delete 119 GBs of junk, not even close), or if the NSA was spying on me then thought the jig might be up when I made this post, so removed their NSA spy stuff before I could catch them in the act and that's what had been eating up all the space.

:cool