Odds and Ends: Rapidly filling hard drive space may be related to Intego VirusBarrier; Knowledge Base updates
Odds and Ends: Rapidly filling hard drive space may be related to Intego VirusBarrier; Knowledge Base updates
Rapidly filling hard drive space may be related to Intego VirusBarrier MacFixIt reader Fritz Mills offers a detailed explanation and workaround for an issue involving Intego's VirusBarrier application where hard drive space is rapidly decimated by the creation of several thousand tiny (4 KB) files.
The files are created by a cron process spawned by VirusBarrier, and can be removed according to Fritz' instructions:
"Starting on May 1, my computer started generating files at the rate of about 1,000 files per hour. Each file was 4 KB, and was named with an 11-character hex number, with no extension. The files were all being written to a hidden directory. And the thing is, I had no idea that this was happening.
"However, by mid-June I knew I had *a* problem because I had lost about 4 GB of disk space. Additionally, routine, incremental Retrospect backups were taking between 7 and 8 hours, and Retrospect was telling me I had more than 1.3 million files on my hard drive. It used to be that I had between 300 and 400 thousand. Furthermore, every time I backed up, the total number of files increased by a stupidly large amount.
"Anyway, to make a long story short, I finally discovered the hidden directory in early July. By then it had over 1.2 million files in it, consuming 5 GB of space.
"It turns out that the files were created by a cron job that VirusBarrier had scheduled in an earlier version of its software, and which apparently hadn't been deleted when I upgraded. For people that have VirusBarrier, if you have noticed speed and disk space issues recently, here is how to check whether this is your problem, and how to fix it.
"You have to do this in Terminal. The first thing to do is check to see if this is actually a problem. To do that, type...
- sudo -s
"It will ask you for your password. Enter it. Then type...
- cd /Volumes/MacintoshHD/private/var/spool/postfix/maildrop
"Note: If you have named your hard disk something other than MacintoshHD, substitute the disk's name.
"Second Note: If the name of your hard drive has a space in it, type a backslash () before typing the space. That's also true if the name has a character that you type by holding down the shift key and typing a number (like @ or $).
"Now type...
- ls
"This will display a list of all the files in the directory. Unless you are running postfix as a local mail server on your machine (and that is something you would definitely know if you are), you should only see a ._DStore file. If you see a whole lot of files, then you probably have this problem. You can delete them all by typing...
- rm *
"Following that, type ls again, and you should only see the ._DStore file.
"However, if you wait a minute or two and type ls again, you will see that new files have been created.
"Thanks to the helpful people at Intego, here is how to end this problem. You must now type this:
- sudo crontab -u USERNAME -r
"substituting your short account name for USERNAME (this deletes your user crontab file. Most people don't have anything in it, but If you have other stuff in that file you want to keep, then you probably know how to edit the file to remove any references to 'integod').
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