Tag Archives: Root User

Sometimes you may notice that the space on your hard drive just doesn’t add up. You’ve opened up the drive in the Finder, checked the size of all the folders against the size of the drive, and found that there is space that just isn’t accounted for. I call this the Mysteriously Missing Drive Space Problem. It usually comes up when your drive is getting close to full and you are trying to find ways to make some more room. To deal with this, there are a couple of things you need to think about.

First, because of the way OS X security works, one User does not have the ability to see how much space is being used by another User…even with Admin privileges. So, you may open a 1TB drive in the Finder, add up the Applications, Library, System and Users folders and find that space, plus the space available, doesn’t add up to 1TB. The “missing space” is very likely being used by the other User accounts.

Second, problems can occur where temporary log files created by the system, which are supposed to be deleted automatically, begin to accumulate. Sometimes this is a chronic issue caused by one or more pieces of software not functioning the way they should. Over time, these files can add up to hundreds of GB of space, sometimes in hidden system folders which are invisible even to Admin Users under normal circumstances.

Either way, you need to be able to get an accurate and complete snapshot of how the space on your drive is being used. The first step to doing this is logging in as the Root User.

The Root User is a special User type that has access to ALL files on the hard drive, including the folders of all the other Users.

Notice in this first image, logged in as drew, the laura folder only appears to contain 73.8MB.

However, once I log in as Root, I can see the laura folder actually contains 32.87GB.

There is information here on what the Root User is for and instructions on how to enable it. Once you do, you will be able to browse your hard drive and get a better picture of how the space is being used.

However, the best way to see what’s going on is to log in as Root and use a piece of shareware called Disk Inventory X. Disk Inventory X provides both a numerical and a visual breakdown of how your drive space is being used, even in invisible folders where the log files I mentioned earlier can accumulate. A lot of times you will find these files in /private/var/log. Just do a little research first to make sure you know what you’re looking at before deleting anything.

My hard drive revealed in Disk Inventory X.

I recently used this software to discover that a client, whose hard drive was “full,” actually had a complete “ghost” copy of the entire drive (that had been created during a wonky backup) stashed away in a hidden system folder. Logged in as Root and with Disk Inventory X, we were able to locate the copy and get rid of it, doubling the available space and avoiding an expensive hard drive upgrade.

Download Disk Inventory X

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