From Two 2 Twelve

It's 2am, Do You Know Where Your Log Files Are?

So, I was having just another ordinary night, you know, where you’re converting some video files for your iPhone instead of doing something truly productive, when I received my first “low disk space” warning on my Macbook Pro. This came quite to my surprise as I had thoroughly inspected my disk space usage that very morning (yes, I’m a power-geek) and noted 60GB was available. Now, considering the video in question I was encoding was roughly 30MB, I concluded this sudden inflation of used space wasn’t a possible side-effect of my extra curricular encoding activities.

To investigate, I ran a quick WhatSize in hopes to find the culprit and found it was coming from my very own OS X Log files. Now, being in a full-blown panic state, not knowing if my logs would keep inflating—rendering my computer useless (It could happen?), it took a great deal of restraint to not just delete every log file I could find, but instead I googled it to get some insight on what exactly one should do in this situation. Sure enough, deleting every log file in sight was the preferred solution, so I did just that.

After this entire ordeal, I’ve concluded this is in fact, quite a unique problem, but considering this is my 6th time cycling my logs (since that first night) i’ll take my chances and bet you’ve had (or will have) the same problem at some point.

Now if you are however, currently experiencing this same issue, I have indeed conjured up a somewhat more elegant solution then the constant metal juggling of your log file sizes with a spare finger on the “delete” key. It’s a little, freeware application called OnyX and can be scheduled to run and clear your log files automatically. There are other applications that do this same function aswell (Cocktail to name one), so if you find something your more partial too, firstly, clue me in ;-P and secondly, make sure it’s set to cycle all log files.