Ah, what better way to spend a holiday than trying to figure out what’s chewing through my remaining hard drive space?

Bad news: I noticed this last night, my HD space just constantly getting smaller and smaller, a GB every ten-fifteen minutes, until I run out of so much available memory I’m forced to start quitting applications. Trying to run any kind of file recovery or hard-drive mapping software repeatedly would hang or crash the whole laptop.

So far today, I’ve installed a few new apps to try figuring this out, and one thing I DID manage to discover is that at some point a few years back something went wrong with my MAMP install, and within a day or two I suddenly had about 20 recursive duplicates of my entire localhost directory, the one I use for local web development. According to the apps I was looking at, this was occupying upwards of 300GB on my drive, so I’m trying to delete all that right now. I verified that it wasn’t being used or referenced with my actual localhost setup, so I hope it’s safe to trash it. If not, I’ve got plenty of backups in my Time Machine.

After that, hopefully there’ll be little enough left on the HD that running InventoryX won’t choke my computer again, and I can see what’s going on in there.