What's going on with the space on my harddrive? URGENT!

It is called swap. Really, you need to delete some stuff. I try and keep 20Gigs free. 2 is going to hurt you. You are seriously on the verge of having major problems. Keep ten gigs free for swap at a minimum.

I know I ought to have more space open, but like I said my thesis is due and I can’t deal with that until tomorrow (no obvious easy big stuff to delete).

Usually it’s fine to work with this much space, in the short term, and it doesn’t fluctuate this much. Why is this happening? Why would a 50MB document be taking up 2GB to work on? Is there anything I can do?

I need a quick solution because I need to work on this all day today!

@zina If you could run out a buy an external harddrive, you could just copy stuff to there really quickly. They’re very cheap right now, and that could allow you to get back to work.

If you have a fairly large (4GB or bigger) USB Thumb drive, transfer some old documents onto that temporarily. Once you have time to upgrade, transfer back. That should free up enough space to finish your paper.

You might have hidden files accounting for missing space. There are free programs you can download like OmniDiskSweeper that allow you to audit your hard drive and see exactly what your disc space is being for.

k, i moved and deleted a folder of 1.5GB to my external HD, and meanwhile backed up my thesis work. now i’ve got 2.5GB open, and i’m sure it would be more after restarting – maybe 3.5 or so). we’ll see if that helps!

i still think something’s funny with how quickly the space is going down without doing anything. it’s way faster than normal.——thanks @fundevogel for the tip – i’ll check it out

thanks everyone for the help – i’ll keep you posted!

Another utility that can show you how your HD space is allocated, very quickly, is Grand Perspective.

A great disk cleanup feature for mac (no need to buy or upgrade like omnidisk) is Onyx

omniDisk is currently free. I don’t know how it compares to other programs but it did what I needed it to.

You have to have at least 10 gig free and usable for the mac to work. You say you don’t have time, but if you stop messing around and just do what people are telling you, then you can finish your paper, otherwise, get it onto a flash drive and to to the library to finish. I know from experience, the mac just will not perform normally without enough space to work. You need an external hard drive and put everything except apps on it. All your photos, music, docs etc. Then you will be fine.

Rooeytoo is correct. Throw a lot of your files onto the thumb drive. It’s a $20 solution.

You do not have enough RAM. When the computer “runs” out of RAM, it starts to rely on your hard drive, as “virtual memory” this has happened to me a few times before, when encoding HD video amongst other things, my 4GB couldnt take it :( :P.

It sounds like the system is saving “historical” data (saving versions of your document, so you can undo some changes, etc.). Normally, this would stay in RAM, but if your RAM is low, it will start paging to your swap file. I think it’s going nuts due to your limited system resources. Time to upgrade after you finish your paper. As others suggested, offload to flash or external hard drive.