Free space in external drive when trash is empty

I had a big folder in my external hard disk (60 Gb) I sent it to the trash and then I empty the trash but the space the file occupied is still ocuppied in the drive. How do I free up the space in my external drive? I know it should be free but somehow emptying the trash didn't worked. Help!

This issue happens to me to on ALL my Macs. For example if I have a flash drive that is 1024 MB and I put on 9 files that are 100 MB the used space is of course 900 MB. But, if I delete one of them then the use space does not go down to 800 MB it stays at 900 MB. You can empty trash and free up used space and it never shows it available again.
I have tried all the Partition Schemes on the flash drives and hard drives I own. (All the drive are different manufactures.) I have tried different formats and it's still the same. I have used a New MacBook, New MacBook Pro, New iMac and they all do the same dang thing!!! I even used an old G4 eMac and same thing!
It's defiantly an OS issue.
So what's up anyone have a REAL fix for this? I am tried of having to take data off of an external drive store it in a folder, then format the external then add my data back. It's getting to be freaking ridiculous.
My poodunk Windows doesn't do that!
OH FYI, A good fact to note if I use a drive partitioned as Partition Scheme MBR and Format FAT32 (so both OS can use it). The drive of course will work just fine on the Windows I can free up space and reuse space. But, when I put it in the Mac I will free up space and it won't be recognized anymore same issue, however if I put it back into my Windows the Windows NO LONGER sees the space I tried to free up with my Mac. I can continue to work with the space I have left, but the Mac has completely removed those blocks of data from being used again until I reformat the drive. Is that ODD?!
Now don't confuse that last paragraph and think it only happen on MDR or FAT32 Cuz it happens on all partition schemes and formats as I mentioned above. I just thought it was interesting that Mac effects the drive to where the other OS can't read that data anymore either.
Please help!
Message was edited by: theelysium

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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.

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!

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

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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 have just installed Photoshop Elements for a MAC. MY photos were in iPhoto, I have 47,000 pictures and my drive on my Mac laptop is not large enough. I store my photos in iPhoto on an external drive. Can I store all my photos on an external drive when u

I have just installed Photoshop Elements for a MAC. MY photos were in iPhoto, I have 47,000 pictures and my drive on my Mac laptop is not large enough. I store my photos in iPhoto on an external drive. Can I store all my photos on an external drive when using Photoshop Elements? If so, in what format should they be stored in? I do I move them from iPhoto to the new storage location? How do I call them up in organizer? And how do I call them up to Edit? I do not want to store any pictures on my Apple Mac laptop. I want to store pictures on several external devices.

Yes you can store images on an external hard dive and have them referenced in Organizer. It’s best to export copies to separate folders/subfolders and that will ensure iPhoto does not get corrupted.
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You can then call up photos directly from iPhoto as normal with the additional option e.g.
Double-click on a thumbnail to edit in iPhoto editor.
Control (right) - click on a thumbnail to edit in the elements app.
http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-elements/kb/photoshop-elements-iphoto-mac-os.html

How do I prevent itunes from moving my music from its original place ie folders in an external drive when I play music from itunes. I have all my music in artist folders and separated by MPG3/MPG4 and FLAC folder within the artist folder.

How do I prevent itunes from moving my music from its original place ie folders in an external drive when I play music from itunes. I have all my music in artist folders and separated by MPG3/MPG4 and FLAC folders within the artist folder and itunes moves the track/s whenever i try and load selected music to my ipod/iphone. I've tried to find some sort of preference to prevent this, but no joy? What am I missing?

Try opening iTunes preferences. Then click on advanced tab. Then uncheck "Copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library." By default, iTunes copies music to its own media folder when you use iTunes to play the music.

Re: Oggetto: Re: Knowing the free space on a drive

-----Original Message-----
From: Luca Gioppo <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Date: Friday, March 19, 1999 9:13 AM
Subject: Oggetto: Re: Knowing the free space on a drive
Obviously the solut

I thanks people that gave their suggestion, but unfortunately these are not
what I was looking for.
The runcommand does not redirect output to a textdata but accept the name
of an output file in a textdata, and in win95 it doesn't exists a grep
command.
The thing that bother me is that if I use the environment console, open the
machine agent and look up the instruments i find the volumes into it,
afterwards having done this operation I manage to find the volume agents
form the machine one even from tool program.
It is clear that the e-console issues some commands during the instrument
menu of the machine that I miss, but perhaps are available from tool.
Does someone from Forte knows how to reproduce the same commands of
instrument menu in tool (I was told that e-console was written using forte
so...)?
TIA
Luca Gioppo
To unsubscribe, email '[email protected]' with
'unsubscribe forte-users' as the body of the message.
Searchable thread archive <URL:http://pinehurst.sageit.com/listarchive/>

All Email in inbox is deleted when trash is emptied!

We were cleaning out our inbox and when the trash was emptied, the trash was wiped out and all emails remaining in the inbox. Where did they go? how do we get them back? What does it mean when the message says "indexing messages" when trash is emptied? Please help. Thanks.

Proceed as follows:
1. Quit Mail.
2. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/.
3. Locate INBOX.mbox and move it to the Desktop.
4. Open Mail. A new empty INBOX.mbox will automatically be created within the account folder.
This will allow you to continue using Mail normally while trying to solve the problem of bringing the messages back into Mail.
If you ctrl-click on the INBOX.mbox package and choose Show Package Contents, you'll see several files there. mbox is the most important, as it is where the messages themselves are stored. You may also see an Incoming_Mail file that, if present, may contain additional messages.
Both mbox and Incoming_Mail are standard mbox files that you should be able to import back into Mail doing File > Import Mailboxes and choosing Other / Standard mbox as the data format. Problem is, the mbox file is probably too big for Mail to be able to handle it.
You may solve the problem with a third party utility, such as Emailchemy, that breaks mbox into smaller files that Mail can import afterwards.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user's home folder, i.e. ~/Library is the Library folder within the user's home folder.

Deleting files doesn't free up space on external drive

Hi all,
I've actually found the answer to my initial query, I would imagine its a common issue. But I have a couple of questions.
When you delete files from an external HD the amount of space available doesn't change and according to what I have found, you need to empty your trash in order for free space to be recognised.
Basically I'd like to know...
1. Why this is the case. I like the fact that external files are added to the local trash in case you mistakenly deleted anything but considering it's been moved to another file system why would it not free up space?
2. Is there a way to delete certain files from the trash? In a case where I wanted to free up space on an external drive but didn't want to empty my trash.
Many thanks
Mikee

Expaning a bit on #1 -
Every volume (volume = a drive/disk or a partition on a partitoned drive) has its own Trash, which is actually an invisible, specialized folder.
For user interface convenience, the Trash folders for all mounted volumes are displayed as a common item, the visible Trash.
One way to see this is to place something on a removoable, writeable volume such as an external drive into the Trash. When you open the Trash you will see the item in there. Then dismount the external drive, and look in the Trash again - the item will be gone. Remount the external drive, and look in the Trash again - the item will be back.
If you have things in the Trash from different volumes, you can also do a Get Info on one from each volume; the pathname for the item (shown in the Where info line in Get Info) will reveal that the items are actually on separate volumes.

Need to format "free space" of external hard drive for Time Machine

I just recently purchased a MacBook Air and want to set up Time Machine with my external hard drive. I'm migrating from Windows 7 so before purchasing my new Mac, I transferred about 100 GB of data from my PC to my external hard drive that I wanted to keep. The external hard drive has a partition of 100 GB (91 GB used) and 365 GB of "free space". I would like to know how to format that free space so that I can use it with Time Machine but at the same time not lose any of my data on the first partition. I've looked around in the Disk Utility but it doesn't give any options to format the free space.
Thanks in advance for any help.

You should be able to repartition it, but that requires that the HD was formatted with Mac OS X Extended and journaling turned on. All I can suggest is you get another HD or move the 100 GB of stuff to the MBA, erase, reformat, and partition into two pieces, copy the 100 GB stuff back to the HD, and then it's set for TM.

How can I utilize the free space in external hard drive?

Hey,
I have a 1T external usb harddrive and formated as NTFS. It has about 250GB free space and I am trying to see if I can utilize that space for timemachine backup?
Please advise.
/S

Use a Windows computer to copy all the files from that external and then format it either Fat32 or exFAT, I suggest FAT32 if you don't have any Files over 4GBs in size. Once that is done you can then Copy/Move those files back to the external and then connect it to your Mac. Mac OS X can read and write to FAT32 and exFAT formatted drives. So you can then use it to store other files on fro your Mac.
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YeaSt2u wrote:
Hey,
I have a 1T external usb harddrive and formated as NTFS. It has about 250GB free space and I am trying to see if I can utilize that space for timemachine backup?
Please advise.
/S

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.
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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

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.

Why the difference in free space on internal drive?

I'm confused - when I look at my Storage info under the "About This Mac" item, my internal drive shows that it has "141.6 GB free out of 499.25 GB" (and why it shows 87.54 GB of Backups, I don't know).
Yet when I look at a Finder window, the drive shows 230.89 GB available. That's an almost 90 GB difference.
I'm assuming (until someone tells me otherwise) that the "About This Mac" information is the 'truest' but I, frankly, don't know.
Could someone please explain this discrepancy to me?
Ever thankful to have smarter heads than I in these forums,
Clinton

Both are correct. You have local snapshots turned on for Time Machine...hence the 90GB's of backups. These backups are deleted as you need space...hence what Finder reports. IMO, there are pros/cons to local snapshots...useful if you accidentally delete something...not so if your drive fails(obviously). Time Machine backups need to be on an external drive, not solely on your internal drive.

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.

Free space in external drive when trash is empty

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