'Disk full' message even though 14gb is shown as available by Finder

I've started to receive a 'Disk full' message when every indication shows that I still have over 10GB of hard drive space available. The bar at the bottom of the Finder window, the 'Get Info' screen, and Disk Inventory X all show that my space usage is about 10GB under the size of my available disk space.
The problem is not limited to an error message - web browsers will also sometimes refuse to download now because of 'disk full' issues. But if I try to copy files within Finder, it always works, up to the actual limit of the disk size. This suggests that something is going on with file management where both MacOS and my web browsers see that there is no space, but Finder is able to manage around it when I try to copy files. Is this a known issue? Are there large temporary files which are not reflected in the available disk space indicators?
I'm using an early 2011 MBP with 10.6.8, and the original 500gb hard drive. I did just upgrade to 8GB of RAM but it's not clear if this is related or a coincidence.

You are Confusing RAM = Memory.. with Disc Space = Hard Drive...
ZeroZeroZeroOne wrote:
I've started to receive a 'Disk full' message when every indication shows that I still have over 10GB of hard drive space available. ...
This is Not enough Free Space on your Hard Drive... You need at Least 10% or 25 GB (whichever is greater) for your Mac to Perform as expected...
Time to Clear Up some Space on your Hard Drive before it Freezes and becomes unusable...
See Here for starters...
http://macmost.com/what-to-do-when-your-hard-drive-is-full.html

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I keep getting "startup disk full" message even when I already moved all my files/documents to an external hard disk

Dear all,
What should I do? I keep getting the "startup disk full" message even when I already moved all my files and documents to an external hard disk.
Thanks a heap.

For information about the Other category in the Storage display, see this support article.
Empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. If you use iPhoto, empty its internal Trash first:
iPhoto ▹ Empty Trash
Do the same in other applications, such as Aperture, that have an internal Trash feature. Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space.
According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB of available space on the startup volume (as shown in the Finder Info window) for normal operation. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of your data. There is little or no performance advantage to having more available space than the minimum Apple recommends. Available storage space that you'll never use is wasted space.
If you're using Time Machine to back up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of files you've recently deleted. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as Backups. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself.
See this support article for some simple ways to free up storage space.
You can more effectively use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space. You can also delete files with it, but don't do that unless you're sure that you know what you're deleting and that all data is safely backed up. That means you have multiple backups, not just one.
Deleting files inside an iPhoto or Aperture library will corrupt the library. Any changes to a photo library must be made from within the application that created it. The same goes for Mail files.
Proceed further only if the problem isn't solved by the above steps.
ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.
Back up all data now.
If you have more than one user account, make sure you're logged in as an administrator. The administrator account is the one that was created automatically when you first set up the computer.
Install ODS in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click anywhere in the line of text below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C:
sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.
The application window will open, eventually showing all files in all folders, sorted by size with the largest at the top. It may take a few minutes for ODS to finish scanning your files.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance.
When you're done with ODS, quit it and also quit Terminal.

I have an iphone 3GS and suddenly am getting a "storage almost full message" even though I have 1.4 GB of free space. Now I cannot text. How do I trouble shoot this?

I have an iphone 3GS and suddenly am getting a "storage almost full message" even though I have 1.4 GB of free space. Now I cannot text. How do I trouble shoot this? I recently upgraded to version 6.1.3 if that helps.

When you sync using iTunes on your computer, do you see a lot of "Other" at the bottom of the iTunes Summary Page for your iPhone? If you do, try a "Restore iPhone ...". That should help.
Hopefully that would do it for you. If not, the next (more drastic) step would be to restore again as above, but choose "Restore as New" and then manually sync. Omit any apps that might be suspcious in their space use (primarily Game Center apps).

Why do I get startup disk full error even though I have 2 gb free?

My startup disk is getting full (I get error message) after 1 day of usage.
In the finder, after a restart, it says I have 2.05 GB available.
Then after working for a while (yes, I keep a few apps open - usually Entourage, Word, Firefox, iTunes -- but c'mon, I have 1 GB of RAM) I get an error that my startup disk is full.
This is my Terminal Log after getting the error:
Processes: 68 total, 2 running, 66 sleeping... 241 threads 16:52:11
Load Avg: 0.92, 0.79, 0.71 CPU usage: 40.4% user, 8.4% sys, 51.1% idle
SharedLibs: num = 204, resident = 38.2M code, 5.36M data, 10.5M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 11633, resident = 436M + 11.8M private, 161M shared
PhysMem: 237M wired, 448M active, 268M inactive, 954M used, 69.9M free
VM: 11.3G + 138M 409448(1) pageins, 267438(0) pageouts
This is my Terminal Log after startup:
Processes: 59 total, 2 running, 57 sleeping... 165 threads 17:00:14
Load Avg: 0.31, 0.11, 0.04 CPU usage: 0.0% user, 2.8% sys, 97.2% idle
SharedLibs: num = 143, resident = 25.7M code, 4.27M data, 7.07M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 4731, resident = 56.3M + 13.4M private, 81.0M shared
PhysMem: 174M wired, 110M active, 139M inactive, 424M used, 599M free
VM: 6.67G + 104M 21081(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts
Any suggestions?

That isn't much hard drive space open. I have heard 10% should be free, so if you have an 80 GB drive you need 8 GB free; if you have 100, 10 free and so on. Even if the figure is 5% you are still too low.
Your error message said you had 267438 pageouts to the disk which seems huge. That means your physical RAM can't keep up and is sending out data to the hard disk which is virtual memory, not real RAM memory. I don't know enough about it to say for sure but that seems like a recipe for this kind of trouble.

When I try to update Elements 9, I get an error message even though it appears to download the update completely. Why?

When I try to update Elements 9 I get an error message despite the fact that the update seems to download completely. Why?

Windows 7. Thanks, but why then do I get a downloading frame that seems
to indicate that it IS updating?
Mila and Bill
On 2014-12-12 14:44, Barbara B. wrote:
WHEN I TRY TO UPDATE ELEMENTS 9, I GET AN ERROR MESSAGE EVEN THOUGH IT APPEARS TO DOWNLOAD THE UPDATE COMPLETELY. WHY?
created by Barbara B. in Photoshop Elements - View the full discussion

What does "Disk Full" message mean when trying to send mail?

I have recently been getting an error message when trying to send email using Entourage - "cannot send mail using this account, disk full". Quiting all applications makes no difference, get the same message. To send email again I have to restart the computer. Then everything is fine until the next time, maybe a couple of days or weeks later.
Any idea what the "disk" referred to in the message is? I have plenty of RAM (640 megs) and as I said earlier, even if I quit all open apps after getting the "disk full" message it makes no difference.
Thanks for any suggestions!
G3 Blueberry Mac OS X (10.2.x) Upgraded processor to 1000mz G4, OS 10.2.8

Hello! Usually the disk full message occurs because the hard drive is at or near capacity. The message has nothing to do with apps except for the "virtual memory or paging" aspect of OSX. Restarting probably clears out the paging file and possibly some other stuff which allows you to work for a while. Select the hard drive and do a "get info" on it to see hoe much space is available on the hard drive. FREE space should be 10-20% and anything less than 10% will likely crash the computer or choke it to a slow crawl. Tom

Start up disk full message/incomplete image

I just upgraded to iDVD 6 and am trying to burn a DVD. First time it rendered/encoded/burned all night and then some. I got a messsage that start up disk was full and to delete files. It resulted with an incomplete DVD (Moives were on, slide shows not). I freed disk space - Project info shows 2.8 of 4.2GB for project and 35.78GB available. I even used an older theme, thinking that might help. It churned for 12 hours+, and I got the same result (start up disk full/incomplete DVD). I have to deliver 20 copies of this by Friday. HELP!

don't know if this will help you at all but it helped me.. Using WhatSize - 10.3.9 at versiontracker allowed me to see where all my memory was going when I got that same disk full message. I have a new iMac and I didn't hink it was possible to be full up yet but a few of my undeleted iDVD slideshows were taking up gobs of memory... Make sure you empty the trash too... Once I made even more memory available I was able to burn again...
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21149
iMac Intel Mac OS X (10.4.6)

I have a macbook pro version 10.7.5 and my mailbox will not open at all and comes up with a quit message even though it is not open. how can i get into my account. it works on my iPhone an i have internet and all other functions working on my computer

I have a macbook pro version 10.7.5 and my mailbox will not open at all and comes up with a quit message even though it is not open. how can i get into my account. it works on my iPhone and i have internet and all other functions working on my computer

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Step 1
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter the name of the crashed application or process in the Filter text field. Select the messages from the time of the last crash, if any. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.
Step 2
In the Console window, look under User Diagnostic Reports (not "Diagnostic and Usage Messages") for crash reports related to the crashed process. The report name starts with the name of the process, and ends with ".crash". Select the most recent report and post the entire contents—the text, not a screenshot. I know the report is long. Please post all of it anyway.
In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.)
Please don’t post other kinds of diagnostic report—they're very long and rarely helpful.

When i send an imessage to another person with imessage, my husband also receives the message, even though it was not sent to him. We have always been on the same itunes account and not had this problem, however, when i added the ipad, this started.

When I send an imessage on my ipad to someone, my husband also gets the message, even though he was not selected as a receipient. This just started when I got my ipad and sent a message for the first time. As a side note, my daughter received an itouch and both my husband and i were getting all messages she sent, no matter which one of us they were sent to. I turned her imessage off. We have all of our devices under the same itunes account so that we can share all music and apps. How can we get around this? I do not want him receiving all imessages that I send, this will get very annoying to him.

You can have a separate AppleID only for iMessage and keep using the other one for iTunes.
Just change the AppleID used for iMessage in Settings > Messages > Receive At

Upon start up I get a start up disk full message and to delete files, now I only get a a blue screen on start up. How to I get past the blue screen and how do I delete files?

Upon start up I get a "start up disk full message, delete files". Now on startup I only get a blue screen. How do I get past the blue screen and how do I delete files.

That;s really not enough free space... you can use a tools such as OmniDiskSweeper to find out where your large files reside and begin pruning (or copying to an external if they're files that you want to keep).
One thing is certain - if you're going to continue your current usage you're certainly going to need to install a larger boot drive.
Clinton

My Friend has a iphone and when i change the setting text messege into imessege it keeps saying text message, even though i changed it

My Friend has a iphone and when i change the setting text messege into imessege it keeps saying text message, even though i changed it.

iMessage must be enabled on the sender and receivers iDevice.

Startup Disk Full Message Keeps Occuring

I'm new at maintaining our Xserve here at work. It seems that each day the serevr gets incapacitated because the Startup Disk space fills up. I keep deleting log files and other files that are temporary, but to no avail. I can free a Gig or 2 then a day or two alter it's full again. Is there something wrong with the configuration?

You found a disk-full message and, well, piled onto the thread. OK. There's a decent shot that there is no connection to the previous disk-full error, too. If you lift the hood and look at the Unix layers, there are a large number of files being written, and many differing triggers for general or for excessive disk consumption.
As was mentioned earlier in the thread, this likely isn't specific to Xserve hardware, and this is probably a generic Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server issue, too; something occurring within the Unix layer of the platform. Something writing a log. Caching. A run-away process. Etc.
Get the [Grand Perspective tool|http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net> as a start. That can show you where your space is going.
Also launch Terminal.app and use the shell commands:
find / -size 1k -print+
sudo du -sHh /*
mdfind 'kMDItemFSSize > 10000000'
The first shows files larger than 1K, the second shows disk space. There are commands around to sort this stuff, too; to rank your use as output by du. That last one, the mdfind command, is a (fast) Mac search command that works reasonably well as part of a pipe.
And 150 gigabytes? That's comparatively tiny. I'm running 750 GB drives on servers that are now three years old. Go get yourself actual disk storage devices. Smaller drives can sometimes be used for high performance, but SSD is infiltrating that usage. The tiny SAS disks that were sold with various Xserve boxes were built for speed and bandwidth (as HDDs go), and aren't so good for storage or for sharing the operating system installation with, for instance, users.
And if it's log files, have a look at what's going on as - as is typical with many of these cases - the log can be filling because there's an error somewhere. And the specific trigger for the error can by most anything. Do your due diligence as a Unix server administrator and find your big file(s) and have a look at what's going on with your Unix server, in other words.
Also try a few Google searches, as this problem is a common one, and there are any number of discussions around of various find and du and mdfind and other commands that can be used here. It'd be nice if there was an integrated and GUI-friendly mechanism within Mac OS X, but that's not available; it's add-on or Unix shell commands for now...

ITunes, iPhone startup disk full messages

Since I got my iPhone 3G 2 weeks ago I have started getting "Startup Disk Full" messages. I then noticed that if iTunes is running, not downloading anything or searching for anything my remaining drive space starts to reduce until the messages. If I reboot this will give me back anywhere from 1 GB to 3 GB of drive space. I used to go for months without rebooting now I can't go a day. What would cause this? iTunes 8.0.2, OSX 10.5.5, iPhone OS2.2, Powerbook G4 1Ghz, 160GB drive, 1GB ram.

open up iTunes to see what is taking up the space.. is it applications/Media/Photos and delete appropriately. If not then you might have just hit a bug or installed some bad application.

In cleaning up files based on a start up disk full message, i placed my music in a place where I tunes can't find it to play. any suggestion?

In cleaning up files based on a start up disk full message, i placed my music in a place where I tunes can't find it to play. any suggestion?

Provided that you moved the ENTIRE itunes folder...
Quit iTunes from under the iTunes menu (by the apple), or hold CMD and press Q. Then, hold Option on your keyboard and click the itunes icon on your dock. Continue to hold Option and you'll see a popup where you can select "Choose Library". Navigate to, and select, the itunes folder at its new location.
If you didn't move the entire itunes library folder, you'll have to be specific about what you did.

Capacity available but still getting start up disk full message

Hi
I got the start up disk full message a few days ago. I did command i and ran Omnisweeper and deleted all the large files. I now have over 50% available capacity but my Mac is still running on slow and I still get the start up disk full message....and request to force quit.
Any thoughts on what I can do. Run idefrag?
Many thanks
Claire

We never asked for the serial number. I've asked it be removed. It is a link to your personal information which others can use to search about you.
Remove McAfee. It is only necessary if you run Windows.
Early 2008 models were not Intel CoreDuos. They might a have been Core2Duo, but not CoreDuo.
Your model if the serial number is correct, which I verified with:
https://selfsolve.apple.com/agreementWarrantyDynamic.do
is indeed a Core2Duo Early 2008 model by serial number.
Go to Apple menu -> About This Mac to verify you have a Core2Duo and not a CoreDuo, otherwise you are getting your serial number and processor information from two sources that got wrongly combined.
An Early 2008 model can upgrade to Mavericks and Mountain Lion. It can also install any version of Snow Leopard that is retail, and not system specific with a Mac model name on it. So your issue with file space is likely due to something else you installed. Not a virus per say, but probably something that eats up a lot of temporary space. I would run the machine overnight in screen saver, not energy saver model to ensure the logfiles get properly cleaned up. I'd temporarily turn off any backup software. And the next time you shut down, make sure not to leave any applications open, by checking command-tab that the Finder is the only open application before shutting down or restarting.

'Disk full' message even though 14gb is shown as available by Finder

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