Mac Hard Drive full message when it's not

For the past week or two I've been having an issue where apps will say that my Hard Drive is full (not the startup drive, the one where my home directory is). iMessage is saying "Disk Full. Messages may be lost" and Spotify is saying "Unable to save to cache. Maybe the Hard Drive is full". The Mac sometimes stalls for extended periods of time (10 seconds+) while opening a file etc.

Looking in Disk Utility, all of my hard drives have adequate space (75GB on the HD in question). But I've just launched it now and it switches between 75GB and 148KB (so there's obviously an issue somewhere). I've ran Disk Repair on it but that found no issues. What else can I try?

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3 Answers

Just to wrap this up for others looking for the answer, you can go to Disk Utility and find the command that cleans this up:

If you have a Time Machine backup configured, Mavericks will use free space to create local, temporary snapshots between full backups to the external drive. I have my Home folder on a different HD than the startup disk and Time Machine used my startup disk for local backups but that may depend on exactly how you split things up.

See this apple kb for more info.

You can disable this functionality using instructions here (osxdaily).

I had the same problem. It was related to Safari having a corrupt DB and by ApplePushService. open Console and check the errors to confirm this. If so, clear history and website data through Safari itself (or by Terminal) and turn off Notifications (google the steps) to solve the issue. Shutdown and Boot.

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