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Out-Of-Control Cache or Log File

The following was posted on the Mac-L mailing list 01/08/2009by Randy Singer, Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions). Be sure to visit's Randy's site: Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance.

It is a free, non-commercial, reference designed for ordinary Macintosh users (not power users) to tell you how to do effective routine maintenance on your Macintosh running OS X. It not only tells you what to do, it tells you which utilities to use (with an emphasis on easy to use and free utilities) and where to get them.

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In some instances, users have experienced a situation that some people refer to as an "Out-Of-Control Cache or Log File." This is where you suddenly find that your hard drive has filled up and you don't know what it has filled up with. This is the result of a cache or log file that has gotten out of hand.

DiskInventory X (free)

or

GrandPerspective (free)

will show you which files have balooned and are now taking up all of your disk space.

Running MacJanitor and then Cache Out X usually remedies the problem.

MacJanitor (Free)

Cache Out X (Free.)

Under OS X 10.5, a few users have had a problem with the synching of their iDisk. If you turn off synching, and throw away the previous copy of your idisk, your hard drive should recover its space.

Check the folder in your user library called "FileSync". Is it huge?

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306904

If the amount of space being used by iDisk Syncing is much larger than expected, or if the amount of reported free space on your iDisk is inaccurate, you may need to disable iDisk Syncing.

1. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
2. From the View menu, choose .Mac
3. Click the iDisk tab.
4. Click Stop to stop iDisk Syncing.

Then throw away your local copy of the iDisk. After doing that hopefully your hard drive space will be recovered.

Other possibilities:

A false clone/backup. Check out this thread and maybe you can figure out what's gobbling up the space.

Some folks have reported that uninstalling MacAfee VirusScan did the trick.

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Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)