8 GB of my HD dissapeared mysteriously

[cnight]

Last night as I was backing up critical data from a defective dvd-r, i suddenly lost 8 gigs of hd space from my startup volume when all of the time im putting everything on my second partition.


this is what i was doing when i noticed my hd space shrinking:
copying files from a dvd-r
compressing folders with lots of nested subfolders using tar then gz
deleting compressed files
all of these simultaneously

im beating a deadline so i just erased my start up volume without pinpointing the source of the problem. my suspect is norton utilities. coz it can't be a worm, if it was then all the other partitions will be behaving the same way by now.

any light on this?

[Henjie]

Originally posted by cnight
Last night as I was backing up critical data from a defective dvd-r, i suddenly lost 8 gigs of hd space from my startup volume when all of the time im putting everything on my second partition.


this is what i was doing when i noticed my hd space shrinking:
copying files from a dvd-r
compressing folders with lots of nested subfolders using tar then gz
deleting compressed files
all of these simultaneously

im beating a deadline so i just erased my start up volume without pinpointing the source of the problem. my suspect is norton utilities. coz it can't be a worm, if it was then all the other partitions will be behaving the same way by now.

any light on this?

"compressing folders with lots of nested subfolders using tar then gz" <- could this be the culprit? Maybe the system's keeping the uncompressed .tar archives along with the resulting .gz archives.


~Henjie

[dude_funk]

Are you on Mac OS X? I believe OS X uses portions of your internal HD as "virtual memory" or "caching" automatically. Have you tried simply doing a Restart?

Hope this helps.

[Edited on 6-29-2004 by dude_funk]

[cnight]

i cleared the caches, swap files and everything... used xupport.
rebooted 3x. even zapped the pram (hey whaddya know it might...).
maybe the program handling the swapping of memory got screwed, coz even after i rebooted, every time there's a new CPU process my drive just kept on shrinking.
on the part of tgz build - the system doesn't keep anything. im using tgzdrop.

[dude_funk]

Originally posted by cnight
i cleared the caches, swap files and everything... used xupport.
rebooted 3x. even zapped the pram (hey whaddya know it might...).
maybe the program handling the swapping of memory got screwed, coz even after i rebooted, every time there's a new CPU process my drive just kept on shrinking.
on the part of tgz build - the system doesn't keep anything. im using tgzdrop.

Oh, you mentioned Norton Utilities may be to blame.

Is it because you are running that Norton backup stuff especially that option wherein all your deleted files are protected (so you could undelete the latest ones). Haven't seen Norton up close lately. But that could really eat up some space. Have you tried disabling those options or reducing the amount of disk space Norton uses?

[cnight]

yup, filesaver. the pref pane of filesaver doesn't have an option of how much disk space should it use...