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What Disk Space Was Lost, Now is Found

system

You are not going to believe this. Short story: don't buy the Adesso Intellimedia Pro MAC Ergonomic Keyboard.

The Problem

I used WhatSize to scope out my disk usage as recommended by Nathan Spindel in the comments to my last post... it turns out that I had a log file, KbdWatcher.crash.log, that was an astonishing 26.1GB that some piece-of-shit process had been writing to every couple of seconds as it woke up and crashed.

This means that I was right... a gigabyte is still a gigabyte; I don't have to think up any crazy plans to get a new backup hard-drive for less-essential data (like music!). This little bastard, even after I removed the log file, kept on writing to the same file... at the rate of about 5MB per hour!

The Solution

It turns out this is related to my ergonomic keyboard, the Adesso Intellimedia Pro MAC Ergonomic Keyboard.

Apparently the driver for this keyboard is loaded onto your machine when the keyboard is first plugged in (although you can use the keyboard without installing the driver). This driver installs some poorly written piece of code, called KbdWatcher, that wakes up every few seconds to presumably see if the keyboard is attached. In the process of waking up, being shitily-written, it crashes and writes evidence of the crash to its log file, KbdWatcher.crash.log (sometimes confused in Google results with KdbWatcher.crash.log). This file is located here:

/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/KbdWatcher.crash.log

With a little googling, it seems that the only way to get around this little thing is to remove it entirely... so, I (re)moved:

/Library/StartupItems/isc_kbd/

The crashing has stopped, the log file no longer grows in size.

Google results that helped me figure this out: