Backing up iMovie files to make hard drive space available

has anyone developed a good process for backing up iMovie event video on an external drive, but still working on those events in iMovie? Or do you have to copy the event back to the hard drive to work in the event?

Hi Jeff
Have a look at > http://www.apple.com/support/imovie/
or pop on over to the iMovie section of the Community where all the iMovie Guru's hang out. > https://discussions.apple.com/community/ilife/imovie?forumID=1411
Dennis

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Can't find imovie file on my hard drive

I have a imovie file on my hard drive that I can't find. I really want to delete it so
that I can free up some room on my hard rive. It's at least 15 gigs big. I tried using the search icon in the upper right hand corner and I tried using the 'find' option under the 'finder' menu, searching for any files over 5 gigs in size. Can anyone help me find this file so I can get rid of it?
[email protected]

An iMovie project is a package, not a file; the actual files inside it are smaller. Use a tool such as WhatSize to locate it.
(23171)

Will upgrading to a new OS like Lion or Mountain Lion delete my previous files on my computer? Will I have to back up my files with a hard drive first?

Will upgrading to a new OS like Lion or Mountain Lion delete my previous files on my computer? Will I have to back up my files with a hard drive first?

Upgrades do not delete your personal files in the Home folder. But any installation can go bad, so it would be wise to backup your current system to an external hard drive.
Upgrade Paths to Snow Leopard, Lion, and/or Mountain Lion
You can upgrade to Mountain Lion from Lion or directly from Snow Leopard. Mountain Lion can be downloaded from the Mac App Store for $19.99. To access the App Store you must have Snow Leopard 10.6.6 or later installed.
Upgrading to Snow Leopard
You can purchase Snow Leopard through the Apple Store: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Apple Store (U.S.). The price is $19.99 plus tax. You will be sent physical media by mail after placing your order.
After you install Snow Leopard you will have to download and install the Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1 to update Snow Leopard to 10.6.8 and give you access to the App Store. Access to the App Store enables you to download Mountain Lion if your computer meets the requirements.
     Snow Leopard General Requirements
       1. Mac computer with an Intel processor
       2. 1GB of memory
       3. 5GB of available disk space
       4. DVD drive for installation
       5. Some features require a compatible Internet service provider;
           fees may apply.
       6. Some features require Apple’s iCloud services; fees and
           terms apply.
Upgrading to Lion
If your computer does not meet the requirements to install Mountain Lion, it may still meet the requirements to install Lion.
You can purchase Lion by contacting Customer Service: Contacting Apple for support and service - this includes international calling numbers. The cost is $19.99 (as it was before) plus tax. It's a download. You will get an email containing a redemption code that you then use at the Mac App Store to download Lion. Save a copy of that installer to your Downloads folder because the installer deletes itself at the end of the installation.
     Lion System Requirements
       1. Mac computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7,
           or Xeon processor
       2. 2GB of memory
       3. OS X v10.6.6 or later (v10.6.8 recommended)
       4. 7GB of available space
       5. Some features require an Apple ID; terms apply.
Upgrading to Mountain Lion
To upgrade to Mountain Lion you must have Snow Leopard 10.6.8 or Lion installed. Purchase and download Mountain Lion from the App Store. Sign in using your Apple ID. Mountain Lion is $19.99 plus tax. The file is quite large, over 4 GBs, so allow some time to download. It would be preferable to use Ethernet because it is nearly four times faster than wireless.
     OS X Mountain Lion - System Requirements
       Macs that can be upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion
         1. iMac (Mid 2007 or newer) - Model Identifier 7,1 or later
         2. MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer) - Model Identifier 5,1 or later
         3. MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer) - Model Identifier 3,1 or later
         4. MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer) - Model Identifier 2,1 or later
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         6. Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer) - Model Identifier 3,1 or later
         7. Xserve (Early 2009) - Model Identifier 3,1 or later
To find the model identifier open System Profiler in the Utilities folder. It's displayed in the panel on the right.
Are my applications compatible?
         See App Compatibility Table - RoaringApps.
     For a complete How-To introduction from Apple see Upgrade to OS X Mountain Lion.

Backing up certain files to external hard drive?

Is there anything I need to do besides drag & drop these over & then delete the files on my hard drive? I feel like I read somewhere that there was a special backup procedure.
I am almost out of space b/c of a ton of photos & videos, and I have a time machine but want something else so that I can access & use the files at any time in the future to make videos, photo albums, etc.
I found an old post on here (pasted below) but I don't really get the 'alias' thing- can't I just drag all the files to a new folder on the external hard drive & delete them from the old folder rather than having to worry about creating a new folder with the same name so programs can access it?
THANKS!
Reply to someone from last year:
It's safe to move any or all of the files that you have in the following folders:
/Home/Documents/
/Home/Downloads/
/Home/Movies/
/Home/Music/
/Home/Pictures/
/Home/Sites/
You can copy the entire folders to your external drive. Then delete them from your main hard drive to free up space. Next create an alias for each of the folders, place the aliases in the main /Home/ folder, and rename them to the exact same names. The aliases will enable all other software to access the real folders on the external drive while taking up far less space on the main drive.
Do not do the above with the /Home/Library/ folder because the alias trick does not work with that folder.
If you aren't able to free up enough space doing the above, then replace the main hard drive with a larger one. This is actually the preferable solution rather than using the external hard drive.

Steve, I think confused everyone by using the term 'backing up' in the title of my orig post. I'll try to use more correct terminology.
My problem arose when I attached my external drive device to my pc and 'copied' C: My Pictures' (which contains my images in a folder called All Images and my .lrcat) to external drive F:. I had two reasons in mind for doing this. I wanted to transfer my current .lrcat and All Images from my pc to my laptop via the external drive and I also wanted to have a (safe-keeping) 'back up' on the external drive.
When I opened F: and checked some files in All Images I discovered that all my .dng files were missing - no .dng icon - nothing. All my other images (jpegs, etc.) were fine. This was my first batch of .dngs in LR so it's a learning process. I thought I'd missed something that needed to be done in order to be able to 'copy' those .dngs to F:, but didn't know what to do.
Perhaps I should add that the .dng files in the C: All Images folder appear as .dng icons which, when double-clicked, open in CS3, so they are THERE.
Some of answers above, perhaps because I misled them with my terminology, seemed to indicate that I should have 'saved' the metadata. That was useful but didn't seem to quite answer why the files were completely missing from the All Images file (which is the folder into which the RAWs were 'copied' upon original Import and converting to .dngs).
Bottom line is: Why are the .dngs not being copied along with all the other images from C: to F:?
Sure hope this makes sense to you.

Back Up iMovie 6 to External Hard Drive

I have a desktop Mac with iMovie 6, with OS X, version 10.4.11. I am about to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but wanted to backup my iMovie files to an external hard drive first. I copied the .iMovieProject file onto the hard drive, and it will open from the hard drive onto the desktop with no problems.
But then I plugged the hard drive into my Mac laptop, which runs iMovie 8, with OS X 10.5.8 and tried to open the iMovie file. When I looked at the file on the hard drive, it was no longer a single file but a folder with the extension .iMoveProject. Inside, the project had been split into Cache, Media and Shared Movie folders, with one .iMovieProject file that was 12 KB and unreadable by iMovie.
So, my question is, how can I backup my iMovie 6 files to where they are readable by iMovie 8? Thank you for your help!

iMovie 7 and 8 ('08 and '09) are very different from iMovie 6 (and previous). They can't read projects created in iMovie 6.
You can use Migration Assistant to move iMovie 6 from your old Mac to the new.
Or if you remove iMovie 8, you can install iMovie 6 from your iLife '06 disc. Then reinstall iMovie 8 if you like.
Finally, it sounds like your external hard drive is PC-formatted. It must be "Mac OS Extended" when you store iMovie projects on it (even if it's just a temporary storage).

Microsoft Word 2008 wonays no hard drive space available, which

I have 196 GB of free hard drive space as well as 4 GB of RAM on my MacBook Pro. No other applications are running. No volumes are mounted to the desktop. I am running the most recent Mac OS (10.5.8) and have installed all Microsoft Office 2008 updates.
Yet when I go to save a 7 MB Word Document--which is already saved to my hard drive--after making a small change, I get this error message:
"The disk is full trying to write to 'MacIntosh HD'. Free some space on this drive, or save the document on another disk.
Try one or more of the following:
*Close any unneeded documents, programs. and windows.
*Save the document on another disk."

Just my 2 cents, after encountering exactly the same problem: I saved the same file in the .docx format, having previously directed Word 2008 to use the 97-2004 .doc format.
While this didn't remove the problem of Auto-save complaining about the bogus disk-full issue, it did seem to allow me to save the document continuously without complaint.

Transfer imovie files to usb hard drive

I want to get a usb hard drive to free up operating space on mac hard drive
I want to save a movie file which is about 26gb to the separate hard drive . I have been reading that it is not possible to save files bigger than 8gb unless the hard drive is formated to ntsc rather than fat32.
Any clues. before I buy something that is of limited use.

1. If t is a USB drive then you will not be able to play or edit the project without copying it back to your hard disk. iMovie can only be 'fed' via firewire.
2. FAT32 has 4gb (or is it even a 2GB?) limit in file size.
3. NTSC is a television system used in the US, the other being PAL used in Europe.
SO: Your external hard disk should be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and should be connected via firewire.

Time Machine not backing up system files on second hard drive

The system files are not being included in my time machine backups on my primary drive (an internal SSD) but they are for my secondary drive (an internal HDD). I want to revert the system back to a previous state because of a change I made to the Audio folder in Libraries that may have cause an issue. When I look at the backup on my backup disk, the folder isn't even included on the SSD (the drive I made changes to). Is it hidden or just left out? I checked the Time Machine preferences and there are no folders listed to be excluded.
1) Does this mean that I will not be able to do a full system restore from these Time Machine backups?
2) How can I include those files in future backups?
Thanks!
System information:
MacBook Pro Mid 2012
OS X 10.8.5 (12F45)
2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
240 GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD (Main Bay)
750 GB Apple HDD (Optical Bay)

I apologize, the title of this thread is misleading. I meant it to say "on primary hard drive", not "second hard drive". Sorry for any confusion.

Backing up ONLY files from your hard drive

So recently installed Yosemite and it caused even more problems I had on this MBP. I now get the grey screens of death during start ups many times before it will actually boot up completely. So I went to back it up and it wouldn't work and I read online that formatting your back up and re-backing up solved the problem and it did. But now I wanna downgrade back to mavericks so I created mavericks boot install and it formatted my HDD and then used my boot OS X Mavericks drive and I was now back in mavericks. And the mavericks new owner intro thing popped up and made me set up my computer info and aske if id like to restore data and i selected yes and selected my external back up drive and it said I could not do it because that drive only had a Yosemite back on it (Because I deleted my mavericks back up earlier) so I went into recovery mode to restore my files I selected my external back up HD and it worked this way but when it finished restoring it restored all my files but it restored It to Yosemite because that was my last back up. So is there any way to back up my files without backing up the OS as well. Would I just have to select every file individually?

Boot into the recovery partition.
Select Disk Utility from the 4 option menu.
Drag the indented VOLUMES to the Source and Destination fields.
Ciao.

First post! Hard drive space available

I've searched mac forums and other but I can't figure this out!
Myd dad bought my macbook pro and I thought, until very recently, that it had a 60GB HD as this is what Activity Monitor always told me, as you can see below.
Once I get close to 60GB I have to start deleting loads of stuff. I thought that this was my max storage space but when I got Checkup it said: Hard Drive 149.0GB capacity and apparently I'm already using 144.3GB! It says it has 2 partitions and shows my Macintosh HD's capacity as 51.9GB...
But Disk Utility doesn't show partitions when I look at my Hitachi HD.
At the bottom it also tells me that the hard drive capacity is 160.04GB
When I look at Macintosh HD it says at the bottom that it's capacity is 159.7GB and I have used 48.33GB but only have 7.37GB available. Activity monitor is roughly the same saying I only have 7.63GB left.
My question is why is it like this and how can I make Macintosh HD bigger. I really don't need that much free space outside Macintosh HD and I would rather be able to use the entire approx 160GB hard drive in Mac OS X. I think you're meant to be able to resize the startup partition but i can't see the 2 partitions! I'm pretty sure the blue shading shows the amount of space I have used and is not a separate partition. How do I fix this? Sorry about all the pictures but I wasn't sure I could explain properly without them. thanx in advance, any advice is greatly appreciated even if you just tell me I'm crazy.
first post btw

The pictures are a good idea, especially with such odd results ! MacBook Pro's don't come with 60Gb drives ...
Have you got a full backup of your current data because if so I'd advise you to wipe and reformat the entire drive and then restore your data from the backup. (Boot from the Install DVD by holding C then run Disc Utility, re-parition the drive and write zeros to it once and you should see the full capacity)

IMovie Project from External Hard Drive not Opening?

Please help!!
Fairly new to MACs, iMovie and iDVD, I didn't have a clear understanding of how saving iMovie projects worked. Reading various tutorials, I thought I had a clear understanding of how they work. Apparently not with my recent frustration with iMovie.
I created several iMovie Projects but needed more space in order to make more projects for my internship thus I did what I thought was common sense -- get an external hard drive.
I exported iMovie projects into my user account and from there, dragged the saved projects into an external hard drive and then deleted the iMovie projects from my user account.
However, when I needed to retrieve these projects, I simply turned on my hard drive and clicked on them to open. However, whenever I tried opening them, they wouldn't open. Is it because I didn't export them to the hard drive in the first place?
What I don't understand is why iMovie is not opening or recognizing the saved iMovie projects from the external hard drive when the size and kind clearly indicate that it should open with iMovie automatically.
What is the proper way of saving my iMovie projects and events so that I can always have access to whenever I need to open up an old project or simply edit?

Freeing up space on your Mac hard drive in iMovies ’08.
The application iMovie ‘08 has two main libraries displayed in the iMovie window: Events and Projects. Events are the main imports from your video camera, say. These files are big and you have the option to save them on an external hard drive and so iMovie knows to find them there. Projects are your editing instructions like what clips you want and where. The files are small and you save them on your Mac hard drive. They are NOT the clips only signposts where to find them (in Events on your external hard drive). You can move Projects to your external hard drive as back-up but iMovie will not find them there. If you then delete Projects from your Mac, iMovie can no longer make use of them unless you manually export them back into iMovie from your external hard drive. See Apple Article HT1026 iMovie '08: Moving iMovie footage to another drive (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1026). Here the external hard disk is used for moving Projects from one computer to another and, by implication, back to the source computer.
Sharing the projects to iTunes for syncing with Apple TV creates (publishes) movies that take up the same amount of space on your Mac as the source Projects. You can still burn DVDs in iDVD using the iTunes Movies as your Media so provided you have iMovie Projects backed up on your external hard drive you can delete them from your Mac and just use the iTunes Movies (for Apple TV and iDVD). In addition, publishing iMovie Projects in iTunes for syncing to Apple TV results in these files being duplicated in both Movies/iMovies Sharing/iTunes AND in iTunes/iTunes Music/Movies so delete them from here and get even more GBs back! Tell iTunes in Advanced not to save these iTunes published movies anymore in order to stop further duplication ocurring.

Running out of hard drive space---can I use my external hard drive-??

I have a 16GB iPod nano. I hope I can explain my problem well enough.
My laptop computer has the iTunes that I use for syncing my iPod. It has over 25gb of songs in it, but my problem is that it has completely run out of hard drive space, and I don't think I can delete anything else.
I have a 250 GB external hard drive that also has all my songs backed up on it, that has hard drive space left on it.
Is there a way to load new music into the external hard drive, that will sync up to the iPod when I connect it to the laptop, WITHOUT putting a copy of it into the laptop, and taking up space-?
The way it appears to me, and I may be wrong, is that there are 2 copies of eaxh song on my laptop---the one in my music folder, and then the one in the iTunes folder. Is that correct-?
OR, is there a way to remove some of the songs from the laptop, and put them into the external hard drive, but will still sync up to the iPod-?
Thanks for any help that anyone can offer, I'm desperate ~!
I'm not sure if this can be done, but I'd hate to think that I cannot put new music onto my iPod.
Thanks~!

Hello melbernai,
I think your best move would be to the move the entire iTunes library including of all of its file to your external hard drive and running your iTunes from there. You can even have it so that all newly imported music is saved to the external drive as well.
For more help on how to do this, I would check out this article on how to move and run your iTunes library from an external hard drive.
http://lifehacker.com/238296/ultranewb--how-to-move-your-itunes-library-to-an-ex ternal-drive
Hope this helps.
B-rock

UML295 consuming all available hard drive space

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I have encountered a problem with multiple people on multiple computers. I am presuming these are some kind of cache files for the enhanced interface, but the device will consume all hard drive space available within %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Verizon
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Embalmed
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Does the desktop creative cloud folder take up hard drive space?

I know this is proabaly a stupid question but does the creative cloud file folder use hard drive space. So in other words, I place a 24MB picture in that Creative Cloud File folder to sync with my cloud files and other devices. Is it taking up 24MB of space on my macbook air? For some reason my brain is not processing this. There must be some advantage to storage and some type of preview instead of fully storing the file on my local computer but just checking to see how this works. Thanks.

It's a folder on your HD. And just like any other folder on your HD it occupies space. The more content you have inside it, the more space it takes.
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Hi there,
I have deleted several GB of messages, folder by folder from Entourage as I have the complete set in Mail. However, I had restarted my iMac and there seems to be too small amount of hard drive space available after this delete has been completed. I don't see anything left in the Entourage folders, nor in the Trash on the dock. So, where else can I check to reclaim the hard drive space? I'm currently showing 140 GB and there should be around 155 GB free.
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Have a look at this article* I wrote:
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Backing up iMovie files to make hard drive space available

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