External Drive is full?

I'm using a 350GB HD to house my iPhoto 09 library. I imported all of my photos (about 100GB's worth of photos). Now, for some reason, my iphoto library says it's 37MB, but the drive only has 900MB left on it, and iphoto is now warning me that I'm almost out of space.
Can anyone explain to me why this is happening and if there is anything I can do about it? I don't understand how my pics were only 100GB, but my 350GB HD is almost full.

OK...I plugged the external drive into my Windows machine and saw a folder that Mac OS was not showing. It is a folder named ".Trashes" and is over 200GB?!?!? When I opened it, is was full of iPhoto folders.
Soooo...I went back into iPhoto, and told it to "empty iPhoto Trash". This, of course, had no affect.
Then, I emptied the trash on the desktop and whoala, the external drive has over 200GBs left on it.
I still have a few questions, though:
1. Why was there so much data in the ".trashes" folder. I did not delete any pics in iPhoto, so where did this trash come from?
2. Upon deleting files, there were some pic files that said they were locked and could not be deleted. How does this happen? (I understand you can override this, but I'm just trying to educate myself on why a file would be locked if it's in the trash bin.
Thanks you everyone for your help. These forums are awesome for mac newbies like me!

Similar Messages

My Mac tells me my external drive is full when it clearly isn't.

My Macbook air tells me my 500 gb external drive is full when it clearly isn't, I have about 350 gb left. I have been moving files around all afternoon from my external drive to my mac and back on but now I can't put my last file back on and my mac is almost full too so I can't tranfer everything back on my mac and erase the the content of external drive which I would normally do. Please help.

Please post the complete, verbatim text of any error messages you saw, and specify where you saw them: in an application window, a CrashReporter window, a log, or whatever.

HT201250 what to do when external drive is full

My IMac is almost full. It has 240 out of 250Gb being used.
My external hard drive has two partitions:
     1st partition (810 out of 831GB are being used) for Timemachine backups
     2nd partition (80 out of 100GB are being used) as Bootdisk
Since both partitions on external drive is almost full, whenever I backup with TimeMachine, it says it deleted
an older version to make room for latest backup.
Question:   If I buy another external harddrive, say a 2GB, do I :
     -Copy files from current external drive to new one, and if so how do I go about doing that?
     -Just put current external drive on shelf and just start using the new external drive? And if so, will
     Time Machine get confused if, in the future, I try to reconnect the older external drive to recover a file?
     -Other options?

For the TM stuff, see Pondini's TM FAQs. Once you sort out that stuff, consider moving a lot of data off your smallish int HD to the ext HD. If I had to do it, I'd repartition the ext HD into two pieces. One at 300 GB to hold a clone of your internal HD and the other to hold the TM portion. That necessitates starting over, but might solve all you issues.

My external drive is full, how do I piggyback it with a new external hard drive?

My old external hard drive is full. How do I piggyback it with a new external hard drive? I am thinking of getting. 2tb western digital my studio for Mac.

Your iMac has four USB ports. If the new drive is also USB, just plug it into one of the unused ports.
Your machine also has a Firewire 800 port. If it is unused, you can connect a new external firewire drive to it.
Note - if you plan on using the new drive for booting (backup or emergency), such as by partitioning it and cloning your internal drive to one of the partitions on it, strongly suggest you go with a firewire drive.
In either case, firewire or USB, it's best to get a drive which has its own power supply.

Recorded 2 consecutive shows, one went to my External Drive and the other to the DVR any clues?

I recorded the Hatfield and McCoy programs the one which recorded @ 10pm went to the external drive and the one recorded right after at 12am went to the DVR. This just started around May 9th. We have done the Auto-Correct for our DVR and that has not solved the problem.

Are other shows recording to the internal hard drive as well? Once your show has recorded to either the internal or external drive, there's no way to move it to the other. So now that its recorded that way, its set. Please check newer recording to see if they are recording to the internal drive. It should only be recording to the internal drive if the external drive is full or the DVR is having problems.
Anthony_VZ
**If someones post has helped you, please acknowledge their assistance by clicking the red thumbs up button to give them Kudos. If you are the original poster and any response gave you your answer, please mark the post that had the answer as the solution**
Notice: Content posted by Verizon employees is meant to be informational and does not supersede or change the Verizon Forums User Guidelines or Terms or Service, or your Customer Agreement Terms and Conditions or plan

I moved all my music from c: drive(because it was full) to an external harddrive and now itunes can't find any of my music. Is there a way to get Itunes to find music on external drive without having to place all the music back onto the c: drive? Thanks

I moved all my music from c: drive(because it was full) to an external harddrive and now itunes can't find any of my music. Is there a way to get Itunes to find music on external drive without having to place all the music back onto the c: drive? Thanks

Hopefully you moved the entire iTunes Media (or iTunes Music) folder to a new path on your external drive. Copy your iTunes library folder out to the root of the external drive, e.g. X:\iTunes (where X: is your external drive), then move the media folder inside it. Hold down shift as you start iTUnes and keep holding untila asked to choose or create a library. Choose the library at X:\iTunes\iTunes Library.itl. Should all be good.
Failing that, download and run my FindTracks script and point it at the new location of your media folder.
tt2

What is the best way to move an aperture library from one full drive to an external drive?

Just want to make sure I move my existing Aperture library on my internal drive (which is full) correctly to an external drive that has plenty of space.
Thanks for the help!

As I use a MBP with limited internal drive space, my approach is to have the image files on an external drive, while leaving the library itself on my internal drive. The library takes up about 80GB while the images are closer to 1TB.
The library always contains 'Thumbnails' of the images which it shows in place of the disconnected image files.
This means I can still open the library even when the external drive is not attached, and I can still do keywording and rating and organising and so on.
I also maintain 'Previews' for my best images. Previews are like thumbnails but larger in size and can be shared with other apps, so I can still use and share these copies of the images, again even while the external drive is not attached.
I don't like the idea of having the actual library on an external drive connected to a laptop (although I have done so from time to time without issue). There's always a chance it can become accidentially disconnected (kids, pets, etc) and if this happens while using Aperture it can corrupt your library. A corrupted library can be repaired with Apertures first aid tools, but it's better to avoid it in the frist place when you can.

My hard drive is full. How do I move my images to an external drive without 'losing' them in Lightroom?

I am a recent convert to Lightroom 5. I currently have a single catalog stored on my hard drive. All the images in the catalog (about 20,000) are stored on the same hard drive. This hard drive is now full. I need to move the images to an 2tb external drive but don't want to lose them in Lightroom. (I am keen to keep the catalog on the existing hard drive and back it up to the external hard drive). I have tried to work this out for myself in Adobe help etc but I am uncertain and mildly worried at the prospect of messing this up. Can anyone help?
Thanks
Damian Bailey

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

I have a macbook air late 2010 and keep getting a warning that my hard drive is full and to delete things so I purchased a external hard drive (1TB) but I'm just not sure what the correct way to transfer and store files to the external drive is. First MAC

I purchased a macbook air about 5 months ago and lately i keep recieving a warning that the hard drive or disk is full and that I will need to move items to trash in order to free up space on it. I purchased a external hard drive 1 TB but I'm very new to mac and ios and unsure as to how I'm suppose to transfer my files (video, pics, music etc.) from my mac over to the external hard drive in the correct way so I won't end up deleting them permenately or screwing anything up with my mac as far as the applications and programs being able to run. Am I supposed to just copy to the external hard drive and then move to and empty the trash? That's pretty much all I could come up with, but then what if i need or want to access that file again at a later time. Also, I have an i Phone and i pad so with i cloud it automatically syncs all my purcheses and if i delete something from itunes on my mac it deletes from my ipad.
I'd appreciate any kind of input i think im just a little lost here. I have to say i love my Mac and wouldn't trade it for anything (except maybe a macbook pro w/more memory)... Is there something I'm missing???

To free up hard drive space the best bet is to move data files that you don't need access to all the time. Likely candidates are music, video, and photos. Things like word processing and spreadsheet files can also be moved but they tend not to be very large and so don't free up much space. The problem with moving the above mentioned files is that iTunes and iPhoto need to know where the files are stored.
Here's an article explaining how to move the iTunes folder. You can move the iPhoto library using the Finder but there is a slight complication. Start iPhoto, open the Preferences and click on the Advanced tab. The first option is "Copy items to the iPhoto Library". If this option is checked, copy the iPhoto library to your external folder (drag it from the Pictures folder to your external drive) and then delete it from your Picture folder. If this option is not checked, it is a bit more complicated and we'll need to talk a bit.

My MacBook Pro hard drive is almost full and I wish to store my Aperture Library on an external drive, how do I do this and is the use of USB2 suitable or do I need to use a Firewire external hard drive?

My MacBook Pro hard drive is almost full and I wish to store my Aperture Library on an external drive, how do I do this and is the use of USB2 suitable or do I need to use a Firewire external hard drive?

You'll get better performance if you use a Firewire hard drive (especially if you buy a 7200 RPM drive). Firewire's IO speed is significantly faster than USB 2. USB 2 has a theoretical max speed of 480 Mbps except that it has extremely high over-head. The fastest speeds you can typically get are about 300 Mbps. Firewire, on the other hand, has very little overhead. The fastest speeds you can get are very nearly 800 Mbps. You will typically be constrained by the maximum read/write speed of the drive, not the speed of the I/O on the Firewire bus. Now if you had one of those nice shiny new Macs with the Thunderbolt I/O and a Thunderbolt drive (Light Peak) ... I think they alter space and time so that your data arrives before you know you want it.
Also... unless you want to buy a solid state drive (very expensive), try to keep your hard drives from becoming much more than about 60% full if you want great performance. A nearly "full" hard drive is, on average, only about half as fast as the same hard drive when nearly empty.
USB 2 will work perfectly fine... just not as fast.
Also... it's much safer to move the entire Aperture library than to "relocate masters". Your images must be managed. You can Aperture manage them, or you can manage them. But someone has to manage them. If you "relocate" them so that they are no longer stored inside the Aperture library then you'll need to work out a system of how you decide to organize things and it's critically important that you don't start moving files around or deleting things without Aperture's knowledge. If you do, you'll break the links to your masters and start having problems with missing masters. If you have Aperture manage the library then you don't need to worry about any of that stuff.... it's safer.
Do make backups (use the Aperture Vault or use some other backup program, but make sure you back up your work if you care about it.) There are only two kinds of hard drives in the world: (1) those that have failed and (2) those that are going to fail. There are no exceptions to this rule. Hard drives are cheap. Backup software is built into Aperture and into your Mac.

Disk Full Message with External Drive?

I have a IMac, G5 and a Maxtor external 300 gig firewire hd that I've used for some time. Recently, while copying files, movie files that are 3 gigs I get a prompt that the Maxtor disk is full. I still have 189 gigs available on this drive and I'm only copying 3 gigs, so I know something is not right.
I have gone thru repairing disk permissions on my hard drive and using Disk Warrior on the external drive to rebuild directories, etc., but I'm still getting this prompt.
Does anyone know what I should do next?
Thanks so much!
L.

There is something wrong, and I have yet to hear of an external USB/FW case that doesn't have trouble almost.
OtherWorldComputing http://www.macsales.com/firewire/
Oxford 9xx based cases are freindly. WD MyBook, Seagate, etc not so much. And LaCie.... known for having trouble.
I would still run Disk Warrior. Why? because Apple First Aid is not as thorough, reliable - and isn't going to put Disk Warrior out of business when it comes to drive maintenance and repair.
Maybe the drive is read-only. Have you looked? Whatever you do, I would have on hand another drive to copy the contents off your drive, and reformat it.
Even when a disk is repaired and says there are no errors doesn't not mean everything is fine and perfect, only that it didn't detect a problem it is programmed to detect and look for. And over the years, is more like giving a second chance to backup files, and do an erase and restore.
The only thing that makes a drive Mac friendly is Mac Extended. And that the case is Oxford based (for USB/FW). There is no such thing as a PC drive and Apple Mac (unless an Apple RAID controller only supports a specific drive model due to firmware).

The internal hard drive on my early 2009 24" iMac is nearly full. How do I add an external drive so that it functions just like the internal drive on the iMac?

The internal hard drive on my early 2009 24" iMac is nearly full. I have already worked to free as much space on the HD as possible. How do I add an external HD and have the iMac read it as though it was part of the internal HD. I know about external HD for additional storage and I do have an external HD, but, it is so much easier to search the drive when it is internal than having to perform a search on the internal drive and then a search on the external drives. And, it is easier to save files to an internal drive so that I don't have to decide which external drive to use to save files. In other words, I want to add an external HD and have it function as though I had purchased a larger internal HD.

That is simply not possible. Every drive is a separate device. It cannot be used to extend an internal drive as though you had a seamlessly larger drive.
What you can do is to create a striped RAID array using the internal drive and an external drive. However, doing this will erase the internal drive and you will lose everything on the internal drive. Furthermore, installing Lion or Mountain Lion becomes a bit of a problem because you cannot create a Recovery HD on a RAID and this tends to make the installer choke. However, you can clone an existing Lion or Mountain Lion system to the RAID and designate the RAID as a startup volume.
I would not recommend the RAID solution, personally, but there are many who do. I prefer the basic solution of spending the money on a larger internal hard drive instead of an external hard drive.
RAID Basics
For basic definitions and discussion of what a RAID is and the different types of RAIDs see RAIDs. Additional discussions plus advantages and disadvantages of RAIDs and different RAID arrays see:
RAID Tutorial;
RAID Array and Server: Hardware and Service Comparison.
Hardware or Software RAID?
RAID Hardware Vs RAID Software - What is your best option?
RAID is a method of combining multiple disk drives into a single entity in order to improve the overall performance and reliability of your system. The different options for combining the disks are referred to as RAID levels. There are several different levels of RAID available depending on the needs of your system. One of the options available to you is whether you should use a Hardware RAID solution or a Software RAID solution.
RAID Hardware is always a disk controller to which you can cable up the disk drives. RAID Software is a set of kernel modules coupled together with management utilities that implement RAID in Software and require no additional hardware.
Pros and cons. Software RAID is more flexible than Hardware RAID. Software RAID is also considerably less expensive. On the other hand, a Software RAID system requires more CPU cycles and power to run well than a comparable Hardware RAID System. Also, because Software RAID operates on a partition by partition basis where a number of individual disk partitions are grouped together as opposed to Hardware RAID systems which generally group together entire disk drives, Software RAID tends be slightly more complicated to run. This is because it has more available configurations and options. An added benefit to the slightly more expensive Hardware RAID solution is that many Hardware RAID systems incorporate features that are specialized for optimizing the performance of your system.
For more detailed information on the differences between Software RAID and Hardware RAID you may want to read: Hardware RAID vs. Software RAID: Which Implementation is Best for my Application?

The memory on my MAC is full. It holds 4GB of RAM of which 79GB are photos. I would like to back up my photos to an external drive but just don not know how. I do not wish to use time machine. How do I back up my photo library, then delete the them t

The memory on my MAC is full. It holds 4GB of RAM of which 79GB are photos. I would like to back up my photos to an external drive but just do not know how. I do not wish to use time machine. How do I back up my photo library, then delete them from my MAC to free up that 79GB? Thank you.

Hi
Just to clarify a couple of points in your post.
RAM (memory) is different from hard drive space. You have 4GB of RAM, but that has no bearing on the amount of drive space you have, of which we know that 79GB are photos.
If those photos are in iPhoto, you should be able to move the entire iPhoto Library, from the Pictures folder, to your external hard drive. You can just drag and drop. Do not have iPhoto open while you're doing this. Once it's done, you can double-click on the moved iPhoto Library file to associate it with iPhoto, so that the app remembers where the library is for next time.
One more thing. When you move a file to a different location, and then delete the original, you don't have a backup. You still only have one copy. So if that external drive dies, you will lose all your photos. Time Machine is a very good way to prevent this from happening. You should dedicate a different drive for Time Machine backups.
Matt

Time Machine doing full backup of external drive again

I have a Time Capsule, as well as an external data drive connected to my Mac. The external drive (named Yoda) is NOT excluded from backups. Yoda has about 703 GB of data on it.
I recently replaced the hard drive inside my time capsule. Consequently, a full backup was made, which was to be expected.
When the new full first backup was done, I disconnected the Yoda drive. A day later, I reconnected it, and now Time Machine is saying it's doing a 703 GB backup. Since the size TM indicates its backing up is ever so slightly larger than the total amount of data on Yoda, I'm assuming it's doing a full backup of the Yoda drive for some reason (the only other drive, the system drive, only has about 200 GB on it).
The files on Yoda weren't changed, certainly not all 703 GB of them. No hardware changes were made, no updates, tinkering, modifications, or anything. The Mac itself has not even been shut down or logged out. The ONLY thing that's happened was the Yoda drive was unmounted and disconnected, then several hours later it was reconnected.
Why is Time Machine repeating a full backup of this external drive? Is this going to happen every time I disconnect and reconnect the drive? Is there any way to make this not happen, short of excluding the drive (which I don't want to do)?

After posting this thread, I did find a similar thread (in the "More Like This" section) and saw your responses in it. You had suggested the same thing, as well as doing #A5 if that didn't work.
I tried #A4 and although that seemed to work in the other thread, unfortunately it didn't work for me. So I moved on to #A5, but I could not get my Time Capsule drive to show up in the Disk Utility. I didn't see a "data folder", but I did try directly dragging the sparsebundle to the left pane of the Disk Utility, but that seemed to hang Disk Utility.
At this point I'm probably going to try deleting the plist file as per #A4, erasing (reformatting) the drive, rebooting, and starting a whole new backup from scratch. It's not going to take much longer than backing up the entire external drive by itself would have, and I still have older backups (up to a few days ago) on the original Time Capsule drive in case of massive disaster.
So we'll see how that goes...

HT201250 Hi, I hope this question won't seem too basic but if I want to use a new larger external drive for my time machine backups, will it do a new full backup the first time I plug it in and if so, do I really need all the old backups on my smaller ext

Hi, I hope this question won't seem too basic but if I want to use a new larger external drive for my time machine backups, will it do a new full backup the first time I plug it in and if so, do I really need all the old backups on my smaller external drive?

50maz wrote:
Hi, I hope this question won't seem too basic but if I want to use a new larger external drive for my time machine backups, will it do a new full backup the first time I plug it in
Yes, it will do a full backup.
and if so, do I really need all the old backups on my smaller external drive?
Only if you want to be able to go back in time to those previous Time Machine backups. When you plug in the new larger external drive, you will only be able to go back as far as the first day you plugged it in and ran the first Time Machine backup on it.

External Drive is full?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for