Large, sudden loss of a lot of free space

Last night I got a warning that my start-up memory was under 1 gig. I looked at my available free space on my Macbook and saw that it had gone from near 30 gigs to about 770 megs. I've looked everywhere I can think of and can't find any new folders or anything that has transfered to it to cause such a change. Any ideas?

I would start checking around my hdd trying to figure out what is taking up so much space. Start with your hdd folder, checking the size on each internal file, trickling down to find what really big on your hdd. if you get into a folder that says it contains a large amount of data, but you don't see anything big in there, it may be hidden stuff, i've had that before. in that case, try this out: http://guides.macrumors.com/Viewinghidden_files_on_aMac

Similar Messages

  • Suddenly have a lot of free space?

    I just synced my iphone to itunes, and all of the sudden I have nearly 5gb of free space!   Up until recently, my phone was always on the verge of being full and the bar at the bottom of itunes confirmed that it was all music, photos, etc. only the tiniest bit was marked "other". I have only deleted just a few things recently, but definitely not 5gb worth!  I would know. that's a lot of stuff-- I'd really have to work at it to find 5gb worth of music, etc, that I'd be willing to delete from itunes.
    Also, I have synced my phone many times in the past year, and itunes always indicated that my phone was nearly full. The only thing I did differently with today's sync was to tell it to manually backup my phone onto my computer. Then I backed up my downloaded podcasts.
    At a glance, it seems like all photos, podcasts, videos, music, etc are still on my phone. so why is so much space freed up all of the sudden?   is it possible my phone full of corrupted data and this particular backup and sync suddenly cleared it?

    I haven't recently deleted any apps. In fact, this sync accidentally restored a couple of apps that I had deleted from my iphone.  They were really small.
    I guess it's just a glitch! I wanted to see if this had happened to anyone else. it makes me angry because:
    A: now I'm nervous that something is missing and I'll figure it out way later when it's too late.
    B: for the last few months, I slaved over deleting things in order to keep my phone freed up. I thought I was putting too much music, etc on it and it turns out I might have had tons of free space and didn't know it.

  • Lots of free space that I cant use 5c

    Hi,
    I have a iphone 5c, and I can only put a small amount of music on it. There is months of music on my computer, but when I 'autofill' it only puts about a hundred songs on. Afterwards there is about 5gB of free space on my phone. I also cant update apps etc as it thinks there is no free space left. I have checked I am not resrving this space for free space in the settings and I have done a software update to 8.2 and also a restore, but no joy. Why is it doing this?

    You need an external disk that is formated as HFS+ with a GUID partition map.
    You can use either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to create the clone.
    Once ypu have the clone you can boot from my holding down the option key ater power on.
    Once booted from the clone open Disk Utility.
    Select the internal drive.
    Click partition.
    Select single partition.
    Once drive has bee formated, restore the clone nack with the application used to make the original clone.
    Boot from internal drive.
    Allan

  • Apple sends notification that my icloud account is full but I have lots of free space

    Has anyone recieved erroneous notifications to upgrade your icloud account? I got an email today which said my account was full but I actually have lot's of free storage.  The thing that worry me the most is that the email said my devices could not be backup anymore unless I free or purchase more space.  I wanted to contact support to get an explanation of why I got this email.  I try to contact support via email for about 15 minutes till I finally gave up because I could not find a link to send an email to Apple support.  Does anyone have this link? I am realy dissapointed. I have two macbook pros, one ipad, two iphones, 27" cinema display, time capsule, itunes match, 30GB of icloud storage, and all the Apple apps.  After all the money I spend on Apple I have the expectation that I should be able to contact them by email.   

    Has anyone recieved erroneous notifications to upgrade your icloud account? I got an email today which said my account was full but I actually have lot's of free storage.  The thing that worry me the most is that the email said my devices could not be backup anymore unless I free or purchase more space.  I wanted to contact support to get an explanation of why I got this email.  I try to contact support via email for about 15 minutes till I finally gave up because I could not find a link to send an email to Apple support.  Does anyone have this link? I am realy dissapointed. I have two macbook pros, one ipad, two iphones, 27" cinema display, time capsule, itunes match, 30GB of icloud storage, and all the Apple apps.  After all the money I spend on Apple I have the expectation that I should be able to contact them by email.   

  • IMac won't save data to an SD card that has lots of free space

    I have an intel iMac running Tiger (10.4.7) and I bought an SD card reader at Radioshack. I used it with a 2 GB SD card that I got as a gift. After saving some picture and music files to it, it stopped accepting new files. Anything that I try to copy to the card will just give me a window in the Finder that says there is no more space on the card, but on the "get info" screen and on the SD card's Finder window, it says that it has 1.61 GB free! I also tried it in my Nintendo Wii, and it wouldn't copy any files to the card. What should I do? Is there a way to format the card and start over? Or do I have to return the card and the card reader. This happened before I ejected the card, so it wasn't that I didn't remove the card. I made sure I was careful when removing the reader+card from the computer anyway.

    Please accept my apology for leaving you hanging (family member with broken down car) here are a couple of article's that will help explain what you now have found.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileAllocationTable
    http://www.mcselec.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=91&Itemid=57
    Sorry Dennis

  • I have a lot of free space on my HD, but Disk utility won't let me add the free space to Macintosh HD

    I recently deleted a few partitions (Linux) after removing them, I was left with a lot of freespace. Everytime I try to add it to Macintosh HD, it gives me a prompt saying it can't. Is there anything I can do?

    This wouldbe my approach (above).  Cor clarity:
    1. make a full, bootable clone on an external drive
    2. boot from external drive, partition and format internal HD
    3. clone back
    done
    G

  • Re-use of free space

    Hi,
    after a large client delete or after important data archiving, does Oracle re-use new freed space into datafile ? ... we need to delete a large client and then copy e new mid-size client but we haven't a lot of free space in dev system.
    Regards.
    Ganimede Dignan.

    Hello Ganimede,
    >> after a large client delete or after important data archiving, does Oracle re-use new freed space into datafile ?
    Oracle reuses the freed space inside the same segment. For example if you have freed space in table MSEG, you can reuse the allocated space only for table MSEG (=same segment).
    For indexes its a little bit "special", because the freed space (in blocks) can only be reused if they are completely empty, because of the index must be sorted.
    You can take a look at the ALL_TABLES on column AVG_SPACE to estimate the freed size in the tables (but take care, the values are only updated on statistic gathering):
    http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14237/statviews_2105.htm#i1592091
    Regards
    Stefan

  • Insufficient free space error

    Hello.
    I try to install EHP4 on ERP 6.0
    I have x86_64 windows server with two partitions: drive c: and large drive mounted to c:\oracle\SID
    Installation interrupts at PREP_GENCHECKS/SPACECHK_OPT with message
    ERROR> Insufficient free space in the database as follows:
    Create TABLESPACE PSAPSR3701           with 64637 MB
    - it cannot find enough free space on drive c:
    But tablespace should be created under c:\oracle\SID, and there is a lot of free space.
    Can I skip this delirious check of c:\ ?

    Hi,
    Please ensure your brtools is at the latest
    version as per note 12741.
    If the problem still persists, you can set the trace level for brspace
    to 11 as per note 29321 and re-run the phase.
    Usually in sap upgrade this is related to Oracle dba_free_space not the
    system free space, same theory should apply to EHP install. If you have
    an Oracle dba you may ask him to check the data dictionary view
    dba_free_space and available extents for each tablespace.
    Also please review carefully points within Note 716377 - Problem
    analysis in the upgrade: SPACECHK phases ?
    Regards,
    Aidan

  • How many GB of free space needed to install Leopard?

    Before I install Leopard to upgrade my computer (I currently have Panther), how much free space is recommended? I have about 6 GB, I know not much... I am currently moving a lot of photos over to an external hard drive to free up more space. But not sure how much space is really needed. Any advice?

    paulae wrote:
    Before I install Leopard to upgrade my computer (I currently have Panther), how much free space is recommended? I have about 6 GB, I know not much... I am currently moving a lot of photos over to an external hard drive to free up more space. But not sure how much space is really needed. Any advice?
    You should definitely get a LOT more free space. 6GB is very little even if you run panther. you need at least 15-20% of hard drive space free to avoid problems resulting from disk fragmentation. leopard needs about 11GB but as I said you need way more than that for normal computer operation. you should free up space and maybe get a bigger drive. I would also recommend defragging your drive before attempting leopard installation given how little free space you've got now. one way to do that is to clone your system to another drive, boot from that drive and clone it back to the internal drive.

  • What does the "Erase Free Space" function do?

    in the disk utility, there is an option to erase free disk space.
    what exactly does this do?

    From Disk Utility Help:
    "When you delete files by emptying the Trash, Mac OS X deletes the information used to access the files but doesn’t actually delete the files. Although the disk space used by deleted files is marked as free space, deleted files remain intact until new data is written over them. As a result, deleted files can be recovered.
    You can use Disk Utility to erase the free space used by deleted files by having zeros written over the space once, 7 times, or 35 times. If you have a lot of free space on your disk, overwriting the free space several times can take a long time.
    Erasing free disk space does not erase the other files on your disk."
    charlie

  • Why does my MacBook have so little free space?

    Received my MacBook yesterday, and I was wondering if anyone could shed some light as to why there is so much room already taken up on the hard drive. I'm new to Macs, so does the OS and all take up that much space? When I booted it up it had about 73 GB available (I have the 80 GB model), and about 15-20 GB was already taken up. Even after erasing all of the trial version software it comes with, I still have a lot less free space than I would like. Any insights would be much appreciated.
    MacBook Pro 1.83GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.5)  

    A full install of OS X will require about 6 GBs of space. In addition to that you have the iLife apps installed. If you also ordered iWork, then that's installed as well. On an 80 GB hard drive you will have about 73 GBs of actual total usable space. At least another 7-8 GBs will account for OS X and iLife apps leaving about 65 GBs free. Deduct about 1 GB for trial software and you're down to around 63-64 GBs. If you select the Macintosh HD icon and press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window you should see displayed the amount of free space currently available.

  • Sudden loss of hard drive free space

    Within a day I suddenly lost about 18GB of free space on my hard drive.  About a week ago I noticed that I had only 5% free space on my 90+GB hard drive.  I deleted, moved programs and files and finally got it up to 22%.  Then a day or so later it was down to 3%, without my doing anything unusual. I then removed more files and got it up to 6%.  But something is wrong.  I've run the degragmenter, disk cleanup, removed temp files by running %temp% and deleting the files that came up.  I have searched for all files larger than 1GB, but found nothing.  My ZoneAlarm AV and spyware scans have turned up nothing.  I haven't searched system files as I don't know how to do that.  I ran RegCure--no new space from that operation.  I'm running out of things to do short of restoring back to an earlier time using a Ghost backup on an external drive--and that's not a guaranteed cure because I am not sure when this problem started. 
    I am running Windows XP Pro.  BTW, when I reboot, the free space remains about the same.

    Mainefrye, welcome to the forum,
    this / similar has been experienced by several members, searching for "drive space" without the "" should bring results. Here's an example with a possible solution.
    Hope this helps
    Edit; oops, forgot the link 
    Message Edited by andyP on 01-10-2009 04:50 PM
    Andy  ______________________________________
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  • 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).

  • I'm try to buy a movie from iTunes with my I pad 3 and it tells me there is not enough local storage and when I go to my local storage there is a lot on free storage I also restarted my ipad but still the same prob what do I do?

    I'm try to buy a movie from iTunes with my I pad 3 and it tells me there is not enough local storage and when I go to my local storage there is a lot on free storage I also restarted my ipad but still the same prob what do I do?

    5GB is typically not enough space to download a movie.  Often, movies take from 3 - 5 GB to begin with.  The only option you have is to delete more things from your iPad.  You can remove unused Apps, pictures, music, text message (messages with pictures can take up a lot of space), email messages, books, magazines etc.

  • Question I have a dilemma . I added a lot of songs in my iTunes now when I synced my ipod this message appear "Elma's ipod cannot be synced because there is not enough free space to hold all the items in the iTunes library (additiona

    I addesd a lot of songs in my itunes, now when I synced my ipod this message appear "elma's ipod cannot be synced because there is not enough free space to hold all the items in the itunes library (additional 382m is required). Then I uncheck a lot of song and synced my ipod again same message appeared. Do I need to buy a new ipod with more memories? Somebody told me to check apply after I unchecked some of the songs but I cannot find the word APPLY. please help I'm not a very technical person.

    The Sync button becomes the Apply button, if you change the iPod's settings in iTunes.  If you are only unchecking songs in the iTunes music library, you click on the Sync button.
    When you select the iPod in iTunes, you see the iPod's Summary screen on the main part of the iTunes window.  There is a checkbox there for Sync only checked songs.  Did you check that checkbox?  If you want iTunes to ignore the songs you unchecked when syncing your iPod, that setting needs to be enabled.  If you change that setting, you'll see the the Sync botton has changed to Apply.  Click Apply.
    That method of unchecking songs works, but it may become annoying over time, as you need to uncheck more and more songs.  If you want advice on some other more convenient ways to make it work, you can post back.

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