Any thoughts on tackling a lack of free space on hard drive?

Photoshop Elements 9 has left me with little free space on my hard drive. Per my conversation with Adobe tech support, an external hard drive (which I currently do not own) should not be used to run Photoshop 9, but rather I should move my pictures there. (I have several "hundreds of pictures in jpeg). I would think that this is OK for editing, whereby I'm only working with one picture at a time. If I follow Adobe's suggestion, wouldnt I essentially be eliminating the Organizer function once the pictures are moved to an external drive? Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Some of the newer PC's don't have internal drive space because they have raid'ed drives.
I purchased 3 external 1Tb drives, 2 at home 1 at my office and I backup (never mind how to the office, that's a whole other thing) to one at home and one at the office -- and my phots are on the other 1Tb at home.
They cost me $99 each, but shortly after they become $69 each -- not much given the cost of the photos!

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How do I get Finder windows to display free space on hard drive?

In Snow Leopard if you opened a Finder window, at the bottom it would show how much free space your hard drive had left. Lion by default does not do this. Is there a way where I can turn that option on so i can view space availible when opening Finder windows?

Stop blaming yourself. You're not an idiot and it's never the user's fault. It's always the designer's fault. Read "The Design of Everyday Things' by Donald Norman. It's a gerat book about how everyday things can be just difficult to use. He's been also a former Apple employee. Great reading!

Unable to create partition from free space on hard drive

I have a segment of free space on my Macbook Air's hard drive. It was formerly a Bootcamp partition.
When I try to create a new partition from this free space in Disk Utility, it prompts me to start creating the partition, but nothing happens after that. I can leave the machine alone for hours, and nothing has occurred. Disk Utility thinks it's working though, since it prompts me to cancel the process when exiting the app.
Any thoughts on how to fix this? Thanks!

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' Storage Display.
2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
6. See The Storage Display.
You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.
You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

Does Erase Free Space Degrade Hard Drive?

I've noticed with my macbook that erasing free space takes bloody ages, 2 hours for 1 pass, 18 for 7 pass, 3 days for 35 pass.
This seems like an awful long time to have your laptop sitting on and open let alone your disc spinning and writing. Does this process degrade, slow down or have any seriously harmful side-effects to your hard drive?

My question is simply, 3 days of nonstop writing to zero out free space from insecure trash empties (some people might have important goverment docs, I don't know) seems like long enough to burn out your drive in one single process, no?
No, not unless the drive is already perilously close to failure when you begin the process.
And with their awkward sleep with lid closed standard feature, you have to leave the laptop sitting open and running... 3 days, surely that'll cause some problems?
Are you concerned that running the computer with its display open is hazardous to its health? Nothing could be farther from the truth. It cools itself more efficiently with the display open than with the display closed. Apart from that, having the lid open or closed makes no difference at all.
Out of curiosity, what do you consider "awkward" about having the computer go to sleep when you close the display?
I agree with Michael that if one were to do a 35-pass erase of free space every week, or even every month, it would become a significant factor in the longevity of the drive. But doing it a small handful of times over the life of the drive — say perhaps once a year — would account for only an insignificant portion of the drive's total use/operation.

Satellite L350 - how to use free space on hard drive?

Hi
Wonder if anyone can help please?
We have a Toshiba Satallite L350 with 500gb of HD. Over the past few weeks the laptop has been getting very sluggish ( carried out de frag etc which helped ) however, today I tried to add something to my laptop and was told we have no spare disc space!!!
On looking at the computer it appears I have 2 drives ( C & D ) and the C drive is almost full yet the D drive is nearly empty!! No matter what I try I am unable to transfer anything over to the D drive so it is 'sat there' doing nothing!!! All that is showing on here is the HDD recovery from intiial setup. I never even realised that the 2 drives were there, asuming the 500gb will be used when you need it!
Can someone give me an idea on how / what I need to do to make use of this extra 250gb of HD and enable me to use the laptop to it's full potential?
Many thanks
Mark / Hereford / UK

Hi
First of all the second partition (D) contains the recovery files and this is needed to create a recovery disk and to recover the notebook using HDD recovery option.
But this should be explained in user manual.
However, I dont see any reason why you should not be able to move some files like mp3, videos, or pictures to the D partition. This should be possible.
Of course its not possible to move an installed programs if you have installed such program on C partition.
In such case you would need to uninstall such software and would need to install it again on D partition.
Nevertheless you could also increase the volume of C partition by shrinking the D partition and adding the free space to C.
To do that, you need some 3rd party partitions software.
I could recommend you usage of Gparted software. its freeware and can be downloaded from internet. Google for that.
Additionally you could clean the system to get rid of some temporal stored files.
CCleaner is a good freeware tool which cleans the system.

Should I Delete Old or Empty Catalogs to Free Space on Hard Drive?

Somehow I ended up with three catalogs in LR 4 -- Catalog.lrcat, Catalog-2.lrcat and Catalog-3.lrcat. My original catalog in LR3 was Catalog.lrcat. When I upgraded to LR4, Catalog-2.lrcat was created, and this is the catalog that I use. I'm not sure how Catalog-3 was created, but all of the images are grayed out and have question marks on them.
I would like to free up some space on my hard drive by getting rid of -- deleting -- Catalog (104MB) and Catalog-3 (103MB). Is this not recommended? And exactly how do I go about deleting a catalog?

Here's one way to do it (year-by-year archives):
* select the year's photos
* choose export as catalog:
export to whereever you'd like to keep such stuff.
Here's another way:
* simply copy your active catalog folder to whereever you'd like to keep such stuff (exit Lightroom first).
The first way, you'll have multiple archive catalogs, one for each year. You'd never fall back to one of these, but you may import from them.
The second way, you'll also have multiple catalogs, each will be bigger by amount added since last archive... Again, you are unlikely to fall back to one of these, but you could, especially if you save xmp too, in which case you could recover most work by falling back to most recent archive catalog and read xmp metadata for all photos edited since then.
Different folks like different strokes - if you invent another scheme you prefer - do share it. For example you may want to archive just the lrcat file (e.g. as backed up by Lr), or maybe the whole cat folder (except for previews). Also, you may want to archive other user files too, e.g. as backed up by "Aux Backup" plugin. Note: if you use the first approach, you can backup photo source files in with the archived catalog (which is one reason I recommend it - a catalog with no photo files is about as much fun as a dead puppy...). If you use the second approach, you'll need a different plan for saving associated master image files (lest your archived storage grow like streganona's spaghetti pot ;-}).
Hope this helps,
Rob

Macintosh HD and Bootcamp Installer Disagree on Free space on Hard Drive

Im having a hard drive issue.
I have 500 gb and macosx shows about 300gb free.
I'm attempting to install windows and the assistant gives about 100gb of space but I'd like 200 or so for windows.
Theres a discrepancy in available hard drive space!
I had installed windows prior and made the mistake of following some bad advice and re partitioning for extra space within windows 8. After this I lost the windows partition. I have a third party disk utility that says the drive needs repaired. The drive has issues with discrepancies in drive space and sectors used and not used. The volume gets repaired and allowed some more space for windows (the 100gb) but I should assumably be allowed most all the free space available and would like to (iI have an external for large files).
How can I fix this? I dont mind command line. Are there third party utilities?

You have two issues.
1. Partitioning within Windows and OS X are using two different personalities of a disk, and if not kept in sync, you run into this issue. Apple does not allow Windows partition to be resized because they do not provide the appropriate tools to keep them in sync.
2. If you are willing to take a backup of OS X and all your files, the cleanest method is to erase the drive and restore from a backup, preferably using a Time Machine backup.

Unable to free space on hard drive

I have been unable to free up space on my startup disk. I deleted several GB of movies and they did not go to the trash bin so I assumed they were deleted. However, when I monitored the storage on the System Information panel, before and after deleting this movies I observed negligible change in storage space.
Some other info:
1. External Hard Drive was used with time machine before but time machine turned off and external hard drive removed
2. trash emptied
3. Restarted computer
4. Drive verified in disk utility

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' Storage Display.
2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
6. See The Storage Display.
You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.
You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

Free space on hard drive--incorrect reading?

I have a Powerbook G4 with a 100GB hard drive. For almost a year, I've had about 60GB used and about 40GB free. All of a sudden, My free space dropped to 12.4GB.
It seemed odd, so I decided to add up the folder sizes using right click, Get Info on all visible folders on my hard drive. According to my calculations, I should only be using about 30GB. This made no sense, so I'm thinking there are some hidden folders I wasn't adding up.
Next, I downloaded Whatsize, which calculated my total usage at around 27GB. Even stranger but it did corroborate my rough estimate.
I'm trying to determine why the bottom of my Finder windows say that I only have 12.4GB free when I should have a lot more than that.
I emptied that trash!
One more thing. I recently bought a Maxtor networked storage device and I backed up my entire hard drive onto it. I also bought a second iPod Nano.
Can anyone tell me what is going on?
Thanks

More like 5 GB free; you can improve matters somewhat by using the Installer's advanced options to install only the language(s) you actually use. Keep in mind that after updating, you still want to keep several GB free space on the HD to permit creation of the temporary disc files used in CD and DVD burning.
Also, check out Gulliver - Tiger Upgrade Guide

Hello all, how do I back up a folder as new library to free space from hard drive to external drive BUT leave my favorites pictures still on hard drive?

Hello all, I organise all my photos in a base folder by year and then sub folders for each destination I have visited, i.e. 2013 then USA as sub folder. I would like to backup each year as new library to external hard drive which I can do. BUT I keep a copy of my favourite pics in various albums which can have photos from multilpe years. After backing up to external hard drive I would like to delete the year folder but keep the pics in the album. Is this possible? If so, how?

To be more accurate, I have no issue doing the backup folder as new library but when i delete from hard drive it deletes all pics that were in my albums. I would ideally like to keep my favourite selection of photos on my hard drive.

I made a dumb decision to 'Erase Free Space' on my drive. I now have no free space, I realize because it wrote 0's over all my free space. Is there a way to undo this??? Help please I can't save any documents now! Thanks in advance all, it is truly apprec

I made a dumb decision to 'Erase Free Space' on my drive. I now have no free space, I realize because it wrote 0's over all my free space. Is there a way to undo this??? Help please I can't save any documents now! Thanks in advance all, it is truly appreciated. how can find the hidden temporary files using the terminal what do i type in?

It's more likely a failed Erase Free Space, which creates a huge temporary file; that's why it looks like you have no more available drive space. You can recover from this. See these links
https://discussions.apple.com/message/10938738#10938738
http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/quickie/recovering_from_a_failed_secure_erase_fre e_space
Post back if you need any help with this.

I can't backup my phone due to lack of free space

I can't backup my phone due to lack of free space on my computer. How do I resolve? I just purchased a MacBook Air and I didn't have this issue on my old MacBook.

If the free disk space on your Mac is too small to backup and your iPhone then it has too little free space to run properly.
You need to start doing some removal of data to free up space on the disk drive. The data can be either deleted or moved to another disk drive. what ever you do leave the system files alone and work with the files in your Home directory only.
The first thin you need to do is to make sure you have a backup of the Mac first.

Once I upgraded to ML, I'm now finding that my Seagate Free Agent external hard drive is no longer being backed up by Time machine. Do I have to wait for Seagate to update their drivers for this hard drive?

Once I upgraded to ML, I'm now finding that my Seagate Free Agent external hard drive is no longer being backed up by Time machine. Do I have to wait for Seagate to update their drivers for this hard drive?

I tried your suggestion, and it's been giving me the message "Preparing for Backup" for the past 8 hours. Does this mean TM is backing up my hard drive? I'll give it a few more hours, but if nothing else happens, I'm not sure what else to do. I'm not sure if there are any new external hard drives that are compatible with ML yet.

I just got an external hard drive and did my first backup of my total MacBook Pro. In my confusion I thought I could drag a particular item to the hard drive icon on my desktop.

I had my most frequently used documents in Documents folder in the Dock. I thought I'd just drag it to the external hard drive, which I did, but then it was gone from the dock and I haven't had any luck putting it back. Somehow the applications folder has also disappeared! Can someone please tell me explicitly how to get documents and application folders back on the dock.

Thank you - I had tried to do this but it didn't work. What I finally found that worked was that on the desktop I right clicked and then selected "new folder". I named it documents (then did the same for applications) and dragged those folders from the desktop to the dock, and am in the process of dragging the documents and applicatons from their original folders into the new ones - it seems to be working fine.
I have no idea why it didn't work as you suggested - I tried several times with no luck, I even took a few unused icons off the dock in case there was not enough room.
So hopefully one of our solutions will help someone else. Thanks again.

Erasing Free Space on boot drive

I am getting ready to sell my older Mac Book Air with a SSD. I would like to erase all free space on the drive to assure that any confidential data I hadn't securely deleted earlier is not recoverable. In my most recent cleanup, I moved all my own files and installed apps to the trash and attempted to empty the trash securely. When the number of files to be removed was down to 30,000 (from neaerly 100,000) it stopped securely removing them. I rebooted several times and those files were still in the trash. I attempted each time to securely empty the trash. It would pop up the progress dialog box but would immeidately close it cleaning up nothing. Finally, I switched to non-secure and emptied the Trash.
I've done to the Disk Utility, selected the SSD Drive (Macintosh HD) and selected the Erase tab. The Erase Free Space button is disabled. How can I securely clean up the free space so that whoever buys the system will not be able to recover whatever, confidential data may still be hanging around in the free disk space list?
Thanks,

read this article, it is outdated, but the info in it is still relevant: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24002. Do a 7 pass erase. That conformed to the U.S. Department of Defense's security procedures until they changed their rules to that of completely destroying hard drives physically instead.

Any thoughts on tackling a lack of free space on hard drive?

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