Check /Volumes/. This has caught me a couple of times. Here's what happens: you're copying files to an external drive, or making a clone of your boot drive, and something goes wrong. The drive disconnects, but the operating system doesn't notice, so it creates a folder in /Volumes/ and copies the information there. You think it is going onto the external drive, but in fact it's just being copied onto your hard drive.
You can easily navigate to your Volumes directory in the Finder: go to the Go menu, choose Go to Folder, type in "/Volumes" and hit Return.
While I was aware of 5 of the 6 steps, I'd completely forgotten about the one above. Naturally I was over the moon when it freed up a whopping 60Gb on my Macbooks hard drive, which was practically bursting at the seams.
Thanks TUAW!
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