I installed Lion on the day that it came out and ever since it has been eating disk space like something is running in the background. Have run OmiDiskSweeper and nothing out of the ordinary is showing on it. Could it be Time Machine back ups or something?
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Chris
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Probably spotlight indexing. See episode 578: http://macmost.com/dont-stress-about-disk-use.html
Heya Gary,
It was local snapshots. It was eating around 40 Gb of space. Have no disabled and got it back.
Thanks Chris
How did you disable?
Look in your System Preferences, under Time Machine.
Yeah it’s not there on the release version.
Local Snapshots is new in Lion and there hasn’t been much written about it yet. I haven’t tried it myself.
On this page, you can find out how to force it to stop:
http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/30.html
But I’m thinking that Apple probably built it to use empty disk space intelligently. So even though it appears that you have less space, it is just using the empty space temporarily and will free up more if you need more.
I’ll bet a lot more will research will go into figuring out how it works soon.
But if you think about it, empty disk space is, well, empty — so using it for backups is a good idea. As long as it frees itself up as you need it.
Yeah I’m still having the problem you originally had but with no solution yet… terminal command did nothing for me.
Yeah I thought I had solved it wil the terminal command but it is still happening too.
I had the same problem. I was running OSX Lion and was using Time Machine backing up to an external drive. I watched it eat my remaining hard drive space until I had zero left, and was unable to save anything. I found some references somewhere to Time Machine making local backups. Something I have no desire for it to do. I turned off Time Machine in Time Machine Preferences (the big switch on the left). A couple hours later I had my 40 GB of free space back.