Hard Drive is full. Didn't empty trash bin but can't see deleted files.

My MBP Retina is warning me that hard drive is full. I have deleted large files, but they don't appear in trash. Can't see them in folder either. But memory issue persists. Never emptied trash bin, but still can't see them.

I have the same problem. My hard drive is full and my trash appears empty. When I drag items to trash it makes the sound but the file doesn't delete and or appear in the trash can. I've tried holding down "option" to empty, going to Finder and holding "shift+command+option" but nothing happens.
Help?

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Start up disk and hard drive almost full i have tried clearing things but it is not working it says its full from (other)

Hi so I keep getting pop up messages saying that my start up disk is almost full. SO I go into my Macintosh and try to erase some things however it isnt freeing any space most of the storage has been filled up by the word (other). Not movies or music but (other) not too sure what it is? please help

“Other" includes everything that is not audio, movies, photos, apps and backups. In other words it includes the OS, mail, documents... See http://pondini.org/OSX/LionStorage.html and What is "Other" and What Can I Do About It? and Apple Support Communities https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-5142
Also see Where did my disk space go: http://pondini.org/OSX/DiskSpace.html
For hints on how to free disk/SSD storage see
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5872318?tstart=0
and
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5939678?tstart=60

I have an external hard drive that is both Mac and Windows compatible and can no longer delete any files. I recently reformatted my Mac, does this have anything to do with it?

I've clicked on the 'get info' tab, but it says read only for all files.

You can't write to it because it's formatted as NTFS which OS X will read but not write to. If you want to continue using the drive with both a PC and OS X you will need to download and install NTFS-3G so you can then write to it from your Mac. You can get NTFS-3G at:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g
If you want to use the drive exclusively with your Mac then move the data off it and reformat it in Disk Utility (Applications - Utilities - Disk Utilities) as Mac OS Extended (Journaled.)

Can't see deleted files in the trash

Hello,
When i delete a file I am not asked any longer with the warning message if I am sure I want to delte and most of all the file does not appear in the trash folder.
Any hint?
catch you later
Steph.

Hi Steph,
It sounds as if ali's diagnosis was more likely the problem. Glad that it is all well again and that my suggestion led you to fix something unrelated!
By the way, just a suggestion, but in the future you may want to post OS Usage questions concerning your 10.5 OS in Using Mac OS X Leopard forum as many problems using the OS can vary greatly from one OS version to the next.
good luck,
littleshoulders

What's the best option when the internal hard drive is full?

Hi all,
I am running an iMac 27" with a 2 TB hard drive, which is supported by a 5 GB external RAID for backup (Time Machine and Aperture Vault).
At the moment I have RAW masters located on the iMac in a special folder and linked into Aperture (referenced masters) and the processed JPEG or TIFF files managed within Aperture (library is on the internal drive).
Well, it finally happened and the hard drive is full, and I need to think about how to reorganize my files.
What would be your preferred scenario of organizing files, keeping in mind both speed/performance and safety/backup (i.e., the reason master files are on the iMac and not just on the RAID is because that gives me one more copy).
Ideas I have come up with:
- Get the internal drive upgraded to 3 TB
- Get an additional external hard drive for the master files
- Split the library and move the less used files/projects to an external drive, keep the others on the drive
- Try to move other stuff (e.g., music) to an external drive (not sure that would be enough)
- Keep masters only on the RAID disk
Any opinions, ideally backed up by experience, would be greatly appreciated. If you'd go for an external drive, I'd also like to hear what kind of drive you'd recommend (this iMac does not have Thunderbolt, it is from 2009).
Thanks and cheers,
Bastian

The best option for your situation in my opinion would be to put the masters on an external drive as referenced masters and get a second external to back them up. This will move the masters off your internal drive freeing up space.
USB drives will be fine for this especially for the backup drive. If you can spring for FireWire so much the better.

Hi, Question about secure empty trash. I moved some Time Machine backup files to the trash from an external hard drive. Now I can't secure empty trash. It starts, finds 74,003 files, and does nothing. The external hard drive shows it's empty, but it isn't

I moved some time machine backup files from an external USB hard drive to the trash. Tried secure empty trash. It counts 74,003 items, then just sits there. The external hard drive window shows it's empty, but the info pane says it only has 50G of memory left. I left the secure empty trash on over night. It did nothing. Ideas?
Thanks,
Ron

Relaunch the Finder, then from the Finder menu bar, select
Finder ▹ Preferences ▹ Advanced
and uncheck the box marked Empty Trash securely. Try again to empty the Trash.

I recently deleted approximately 80gb of space on my hard drive by dragging items to the trash and then emptying the trash. However, the space does not show up on my HD as free. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I recently deleted approximately 80gb of space on my hard drive by dragging items to the trash and then emptying the trash. However, the space does not show up on my HD as free. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

If you are using File Vault, turn it off. To find out where all the extra space is use any of these products - Disk Inventory X
OmniDiskSweeper
WhatSize
SpaceControl

I have a macbook pro and apple tv2. My problem is that my hard drive is full. What is my best option to empty movies off of my macbook but still access them through atv2?

I have a macbook pro and apple tv2. My problem is that my hard drive is full. What is my best option to empty movies off of my macbook but still access them through atv2?

ok. I do have a time capsule but if I move itunes on to it how do I sync my ipods and iphone? Or can I have my Itunes account on both and just move my movies to the time capsule?

Macbook pro redina display keeps on telling me that the hard drive is full from Videos, and yet their is no videos, what can i do?

Macbook pro redina display keeps on telling me that the hard drive is full from Videos, and yet their is no videos, what can i do?

If the Storage display seems to be inaccurate, try rebuilding the Spotlight index.
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 restart the computer. 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 the 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.
When Time Machine backs up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. 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. If you followed bad advice to disable local snapshots by running a shell command, you may have ended up with a lot of data in the Other category. Ask for instructions in that case.
See this support article for some simple ways to free up storage space.
You can more effectively use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) or GrandPerspective (GP) to explore the 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. Note that ODS only works with OS X 10.8 or later. If you're running an older OS version, use GP.
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 or GP 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 the app you downloaded in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click anywhere in the corresponding 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
sudo /Applications/GrandPerspective.app/Contents/MacOS/GrandPerspective
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 by pressing command-V. You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. Type carefully and then press return. 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. Ignore any other messages that appear in the Terminal window.
The application window will open, eventually showing all files in all folders, sorted by size. It may take a few minutes for the app to finish scanning.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything 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 the app, quit it and also quit Terminal.

Hard drive is full software cannot get updated! what should I do?

Hard drive is full software cannot get updated! what should I do?

Here are some general tips to keep your Mac's hard drive trim and slim as possible
You should never, EVER let a conputer hard drive get completely full, EVER!
With Macs and OS X, you shouldn't let the hard drive get below 15 GBs or less of free data space.
If it does, it's time for some hard drive housecleaning.
Follow some of my tips for cleaning out, deleting and archiving data from your Mac's internal hard drive.
Have you emptied your Mac's Trash icon in the Dock?
If you use iPhoto, iPhoto has its own trash that needs to be emptied, also.
If you store images in other locations other than iPhoto, then you will have to weed through these to determine what to archive and what to delete.
If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!
Delete any old or no longer needed emails and/or archive to disc, flash drives or external hard drive, older emails you want to save.
Look through your other Mailboxes and other Mail categories to see If there is other mail you can archive and/or delete.
STAY AWAY FROM DELETING ANY FILES FROM OS X SYSTEM FOLDER!
Look through your Documents folder and delete any type of old useless type files like "Read Me" type files.
Again, archive to disc, flash drives, ext. hard drives or delete any old documents you no longer use or immediately need.
Look in your Applications folder, if you have applications you haven't used in a long time, if the app doesn't have a dedicated uninstaller, then you can simply drag it into the OS X Trash icon. IF the application has an uninstaller app, then use it to completely delete the app from your Mac.
To find other large files, download an app called Omni Disk Sweeper.
Download an app called OnyX for your version of OS X.
When you install and launch it, let it do its initial automatic tests, then go to the cleaning and maintenance tabs and run the maintenance tabs that let OnyX clean out all web browser cache files, web browser histories, system cache files, delete old error log files.
Typically, iTunes and iPhoto libraries are the biggest users of HD space.
move these files/data off of your internal drive to the external hard drive and deleted off of the internal hard drive.
If you have any other large folders of personal data or projects, these should be archived or moved, also, to the optical discs, flash drives or external hard drive and then either archived to disc and/or deleted off your internal hard drive.
Good Luck!

I have macbook pro 13" I want to know how to copy files from my mac to the external Toshiba Hard Drive. I can't even delete files from my external hard drive. please help me my macbook HD is almost full and I have to copy my images to the Toshiba HD

I have macbook pro 13" I want to know how to copy files from my mac to the external Toshiba Hard Drive. I can't even delete files from my external hard drive. please help me my macbook HD is almost full and I have to copy my images to the Toshiba HD

To delete files from your external HDD, attach it to your MBP and drag the unwanted files to trash and then empty trash.
Then you select the files that you want to transfer by 'drag and drop' to the external HDD and trash the files on your MBP.
Ciao.

My hard drive is full even when I delete big files?

I got a notification telling me my hard drive was full. I had been downloading a lot lately so I knew it was going to happen. I then went through and deleted 34GB that I had in one of my folders. But even when I deleted and emptyed my trash my hard drive says it's still full. I showed hidden files but there aren't enough of those to be causing the issue.
I'm planning on getting an external hard drive to free up another 68BG or more of space but until I do I need to know why the 34GB that I deleted didnt free up space.

What version of the Mac OS is running on your MacBook?

My hard drive is full, and it will not let me delete anything... :(

hello, so here is the story...
i bought my iMac about a little more than half year ago and i really like this mac. About 3 months ago, my computer started popping up me hard drive is full messages, and i did not really bother to delete any files. Because i have been using computers before this one, and i have never used up all the spaces before and the computer i have used before had even smaller hard drives. At the time i did not think it is going to effect my usage of this computer so i kept on using it. After about a month, while i was using my computer, it suddenly shut down and when i restart it my desktop is a plain blue background, with no wallpaper or any icons. Then i tried to delete some files, but when i try to do so, i can not even open up my applications or any kind of window. The only thing that i can open is safari, so right now i can only serve the internet, can not even watch any videos or movies online...
can anyone tell me how to delete files right now, because my hard drive is so limited right now, i can not even open up anything, so there is no way to delete any files

In all your use of computers, did you learn how to recover your backups and have a good backup strategy in place?
Or are you going to need help now on backups, recoverying files (already some good threads to just re-read), and rebuild your hard drive.
For starters you will need one or more external drives, and install OS X on one of them and use one or part of one for recovering files.
You should be able to free up space. Just go to your home account folder / library / caches and trash anything to do with Safari like Metadata cache folder to free up a little.
You don't need to "open" anything other than Finder. And you probably want to boot with SHIFT KEY at the least on startup - continue to hold shift key until you hit the desktop.
But you really should not or limit any use of this hard drive, and work from and boot from another hard drive for now.
Pick up some USB/FW drives:
http://www.macsales.com/firewire

Message that hard drive is full when clearly it is not!!!! HELP!!!

This is weird. Got a message that I had 117 mb left on hard drive. Dumped a bunch of programs and pictures. Then it said I had 25 gb on drive. Three days later, having done NOTHING, I got a message I was totally out of hard drive space again. Dumped a couple of programs - back up to 1.84 gb. An hour later it is full FULL AGAIN. I had done NOTHING. What is going on here??? My user folder says I have no space when I go to "get info" but when I check "get info" on all the folders inside (system, library, pictures, music, etc) it only adds up to half of the capacity of my hard drive (250 gbs). So in fact I know I only have less than 100 gb on that computer This is very strange. The drive is not full, and when I dump programs and data, it fills itself back up but can't find out why/how/where. I threw out the finder preferences but that didn't work. I booted up from my Leopard disk and it said my hard drive was full, but I KNOW it is not. What is going on??

Sounds like something is generating garbage. You've got a couple of options (at least) to track it down, starting with one tool built into the command-line interface. Pop open the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Termain.app) and type in the following:
cd /
sudo du -hd 1
Enter your password when prompted. du is the Disk Usage command, which will print out the disk space taken up by each folder, including invisible ones. Note that du can take a fair bit of time to complete; my own drive took about 5-6 minutes with only 27GB on it, so yours will probably take longer.
Your other option is to grab Disk Inventory X, a freeware utility which performs a very similar job to du, but with a shiny user interface to help you locate the offending space waster. If you're not comfortable with the terminal, this may be the best place to start.

MacBook hard drive is full again. Replaced original hard drive with a Samsung SSD 840 Pro Series 256GB hard drive about 18 mo. ago, but my MacBook is now already saying that my hard drive is full again. 13in. Alum. Late 2008 MacBook

My MacBook hard drive is full again. I have a 13in. Aluminum, Late 2008 MacBook, and about 18 months ago (in October 2013), I replaced the original hard drive with a Samsung SSD 840 Pro Series 256GB hard drive. However, my MacBook is now already saying that my hard drive is full again. When I check "System Information," under "Storage," it states the following: Audio 52.02 GB; Movies 33.68GB; Photos 43.13GB; Apps 14.76 GB; Backups 174.4 MB; and Other 96.39GB.
Also, at home, I have an Apple Time Capsule 4th Generation 2TB that I use as my wireless router, and I also use it for automatic backup via Time Machine. And when I first purchased Time Capsule, the first time I connected Time Capsule, Time Machine asked if I would like to use it to back up my files, and I clicked, "Use as Backup Disk." And that's really all I've ever done with Time Capsule.
In addition, I also have a LaCie Porsche Design P'9223 1TB external hard drive. I have copied my MacBook's hard drive onto my LaCie external hard drive.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Obviously the Audio, Movies, Photos, and Apps are taking up a lot of space... Any suggestions re: what I can do with Audio, Movies, Photos, and Apps? And what about the Other? Other is taking up 96.39 GB. What is Other, and what can I do about it?
And what about partitioning my hard drive... Is that something I should do? Should I partition, or configure, my MacBook's internal hard drive differently? And should I partition, or configure, my external hard drive? And if I need to partition, or configure, my MacBook's internal hard drive differently, how do I setup Time Machine to backup per any such changes? Same thing for my external hard drive?
13in. Aluminum, Late 2008 MacBook, 250 GB (with upgraded Samsung SSD 840 Pro Series 256GB hard drive)
Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory 2 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
OS X 10.9.5
plus
Apple Time Capsule 4th Generation 2TB
LaCie Porsche Design P'9223 1TB external hard drive
Thank you for your help.

Partitioning makes no sense. You have a drawer full of stuff. Split it into two smaller drawers and you have two smaller drawers full of stuff.
Decide what you can store on external storage - your iPhoto/Aperture/Lightroom libraries can all be stored on externals, as can your iTunes Libraries and so on. Do you need to carry 30 gigs of movies with you all the time? You can get portable drives the size of an iPhone these days.

Hard Drive is full. Didn't empty trash bin but can't see deleted files.

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