Out-Of-Control Cache or Log File

The following was posted on the Mac-L mailing list by 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.

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Usually when a drive fills up suddenly with no apparent explanation it is due to an application that is having problems and it is writing an error message to a log over and over continuously until the log gets so big that it fills up your drive.

You can often temporarily reclaim the lost space by running:

YASU (free, donation requested) and having YASU clear all of your logs and caches, and run OS X's built-in routine maintenance scripts.

Running one or both of these two free utilities will help you find out which file has ballooned and is now taking up all of your free disk space:

DiskInventory X (free)

or

GrandPerspective (free)

Usually this will be a log file. Once you have found which log file is growing, you can read it with one of these.

Console (part of OS X)

Applications/Utilities/Console.app

or

LogSurfer (free)

The offending log file will probably have the same error message in it, over and over, from a particular application.

Launch Activity Monitor (in the same folder as Console), choose the offending application, and click on the icon for "Stop Process". Now delete that application and reinstall a fresh copy.

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)