Startup disk suddenly full

[lindseylou04]

Hi I'm relatively new to mac - I've had my Macbook pro for less than a year. I have a 500GB hard drive, and probably use less than 100GB of data. In the last 2 days I've received warnings that my startup disk is nearly full and Finder shows all 499.25GB as in use. I checked Console and found 4000 messages in the last 3 days. I have no clue how to read them, but some identical and some similar repeat quite excessively.

For Example, this message repeated almost identically almost 80 times:

1/4/13 5:40:37.915 PM ReportCrash: 76 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff8ada0eac NSApplicationMain + 867

There are several occurrences of similar "report crash" groups of messages, many seeming to be repeating upwards of 100x.
How in the world do I decipher these and find out what is going wrong?
Thanks!
Lindsey

 

[lindseylou04]

Also found this in the console log:

1/4/13 11:37:16.286 PM ReportCrash: *** process 3078 exceeded 500 log message per second limit - remaining messages this second discarded ***

Top senders are:
Report crash
Kernel
com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0
microsoft word
[0x0-0x82082].com.apple.Safari
GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon
com.apple.AdressBook.SourceSync
UserEventAgent
Mail
com.apple.UpdateSettings

 

[Kaveman]

GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon

I'd be guessing this is taking the others down, then re-spawning and and doing it again and again and again...

You'll need to track it down and kill it, if you don't know Unix you might be best taking it to an AppleCare Service Centre near you.

 

[oldscribe]

I'd be guessing this is taking the others down, then re-spawning and and doing it again and again and again...

According to many the Google Update fires up every 30 mins to check for for an update, real pain.

 

[Kaveman]

I'm guessing something is crashing and then re-spawning and this is being logged.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Don't know if this'll help?

Managing updates in Google Software Update
Google Software Update is responsible for updating Google applications running on Mac OS X. By default, Google Software Update currently checks for new updates once a day. While this works well for most users, some individuals may desire more control over when updates occur. For these users, Google Software Update offers the ability to change the frequency of update checks or turn off update checks all together.

Update Frequency

To change how frequently Google Software Update checks for updates, execute the following in the Terminal application:

$ defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval <frequency>

where <frequency> is the elapsed time in seconds between update checks.

To disable Google Software Update from checking for updates, execute the following in the Terminal application:

$ defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0

Manual Updates

Google Software Update also provides a way to manually update all Google software on a user's Mac. Here's how:

In Finder, select Go > Go to Folder.
In the window that appears, enter one of the following locations. It's expected that one of these folders won't be found:
/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/
~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/
In the folder that opens, double click the file named 'CheckForUpdatesNow.command'.
Terminal will open to run the file. When you see the message '[Process completed]' you can close Terminal. Once this is done, your Google programs will be up to date.

Depending on available updates, you may also see a window appear for Google Software Update.