How to defragment and compact free space in Intel based iMacs?
Hi. I had some problems with the OS, so I decided to re-install it. After that I deleted a lot of Stuff I don't really need. Now I have big blocks of free Space in my hard drive and I think that make do an annoing noise. I tryed "iDefrag" but this software just let me do a very normal quick Defrag.
iDefrag says that in order to compact free space, I have to unmount the volume from a different one with the System already installed on it...or from a CD.
I tryed using my FW drive. But it doesn't work as I spected.
So, How can I boot iMac from a CD or DVD in order to run iDefrag and do that "defrag and compact free space".
Thank you
Licht,
Nope, and I wouldn't even try the Norton method. It is fraught with difficulty and can leave you in worse shape than you were before. Best to clone twice and erase, and restore. That's much safer. Here's my FAQ on backing up which includes how to clone:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
For bigger files than Mac OS X defragments on the fly which I mention earlier in the thread, I've found using a separate scratch partition that I can erase with Disk Utility when I'm done creating content and want to create new content that is video or audio works best. The only time Mac OS X experiences fragmentation is with large video files.
I've also found keeping your hard disk at least 10 GB free helps a lot.
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Hi,
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How can I use the 1 Tb free space to ave data available from all my devices ?
Tksthierry118 wrote:
Just set up a 2T Time Capsule and use it as Time Machine for my IMac and my MacBook.
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HARD TO SOLVE - User account free space and HD free space do not match
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My guess was that the filevault account XYZ is limited by size since it comes from the old HD which was only 320Gb, but even that makes no solution, as it occupies a lot more than 320Gb at this point (my iTunes lib is bigger). As I said, the Luxembourg APR have no idea how to solve this issue, I would be more than glad if one of you had a solution to trick the filevault account XYZ into believing it had more space allocated (I'm not that used to the terminal, it may be the key to the problem).
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LaurentHi,
My guess was that the filevault account XYZ is limited by size since it comes from
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Yes, I think this is what happened - see
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http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24068
but even that makes no solution, as it occupies a lot more than 320Gb at this
point (my iTunes lib is bigger).
At least in Snow Leopard, when you create a FileVault account the "potential capacity" of the FileVault volume contained in the sparsebundle is twice the size of the underlying HD! Obviously that capacity could never be realized, since the sparsebundle could not grow larger than the HD that contains it. So for example, my startup HD volume capacity is 320GB. If I create a test Filevault account named "fv" and Get Info on the FileVault mounted volume (the icon in the sidebar), it shows an apparent capacity of 640GB! The reported Used space is apparently artificially inflated so as to make the actual available space seem correct:
The normal fix for your situation is to turn off Filevault and then optionally turn it on again, but you currently don't have enough free space on the HD to do this. The FileVault sparsebundle is supposed to self-compact when you log out of FileVault, and so compacting it manually may not help. If you do try this via a Terminal command, I think you will have to do it as root - I could not directly access a FileVault sparsebundle from a different admin account.
The support article above suggests:
If you do not have sufficient free space on your hard disk, you will need to temporarily reduce the size of your home directory, for example by copying a large amount of data in your home directory to an external hard disk, then deleting the stuff that you moved from your Home. After copying, log out or restart so that FileVault can reclaim the unused space.
This seems safe, though time-consuming.
An alternative approach would be to try to directly resize the FileVault sparsebundle and its contained volume. This can apparently be done, but is obviously risky since if something goes wrong you could easily lose everything in the Filevault account. I did some experimenting and was able to increase the size of my test FileVault home volume to 1T by logging out of the Filevault account, logging into a different admin account, and then using this Terminal command:
sudo hdiutil resize -size 1000g /Users/username/username.sparsebundle
Here <username> is the name of the FileVault account. I was asked first for the current logged-in admin account password (for the sudo) and then for the password to access the sparsebundle, which is the password for the FileVault account. This seemed to work (it took some time to complete), and I was then able to re-log into the Filevault account. The sidebar Filevault icon Get Info now showed a capacity of 1.07 TB.
But again, this seems risky - I can't recommend trying it except perhaps on a backup clone.
Message was edited by: jsd2 -
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I went to erase the free space on my MacBook Pro Retina in the Disk Utility but it says not available for this type of drive. Is there a way I can get around this?
You can't use Disk Utility to securely erase a Solid State Disk drive, because of the fact that SSD's have limited write capability, unlike hard drives, thus have to protect the sectors from as little writes as possible.
In fact TRIM (wear leveling) is enabled to write new data to the least used sectors on a SSD each time.
The NSA guidelines for secure data destruction on SSD's is to grind them into a fine powder.
If you don't require this level of data destruction, you can do this trick below, but not often or you'll premaurely wear out your SSD.
Finder > Duplicate a small file repeatly in a folder until slightly more than 50% of the remaining free space on the SSD is used up, (use Activity Monitor) then delete this folder.
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What this will do is, because of the small file, OS X will fill the smallest unused spots on the SSD, the duplicates will fill the remaining free space half way, then the second folder will (because of TRIM) fill the other remaining 50% of the free space.
You can't fill your boot drive or the machine can refuse to function or boot, but because of the wear leveling this should overwrite all your available free space on the SSD once.
If you have a laptop and TimeMachine, there is a hidden database on the boot drive which will store a copy of the deleted data.
Then there is "versions" and it's possible a copy of the deleted data is stored in that cache file still on the SSD.
I can advise how to delete the TimeMachine backup file on the boot drive, but not the "versions" database or what it contains.
How do I securely delete data from the machine?
If your really paranoid it's likely best to reformat the entire MacintoshHD partition from recovery and then with a new user, then do the Finder > Duplicate procedure to overwrite the deleted data off the SSD, this way the "versions" and TimeMachine databases are also overwritten.
Nothing is safe anymore.
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