Lost Free Space

I should have about 50GB of free space on my MacBook Pro. I was running Parallels on it. Parallels seemed to have a memory leak of sorts where it would consume unneeded disc space and keep it. I am aparently not a skilled Mac User, as I decided to stop using Parallels, and use this device as a pure Mac. So I deleted Parallels ... none of the space that was used legitimately for Parallels nor any of the space it consumed has been returned to the free space. How do I get that space back on my hard drive?
Thank you,
John

Try this: Click on the HDD in Finder. Click on the Users folder triangle and then the Home folder triangle so that it shows the sub folders like this:
Perform a COMMAND J and select 'Calculate All Sizes'. It may take a minute or two for the MBP to finish this task. With this you may be able to determine where the 'missing data' is.
Note that variances between the OmniDiskSweeper and the MBP file sizes are attributable to how they are calculated. ODS is binary, MBP is decimal so multiply MBP values by .93 to find the equivalent.
Ciao.

Similar Messages

"Lost free space" on TC 500GB; Finder tells 148 GB, Terminal 250?

Hello,
i wonder about my TimeCapsule 500 GB. About 100 GB free space is lost in space.
If I press CMD-I in the finder, my sparsebundles size is about 148 GB,
if I look using the terminal i find 250 GB.
If I check using the airport-utility, about 100 GB are missing.
(Both, iMac and Macbook, use the same TC for Backup.)
The given size for the macbooks sparsebundle seems ok, about 90 GB.
How to repair, detect, fix? Is there a reorganisation-tool available?
Thanks for any hints.

Hi,
Have you received any responses at all to this? It doesn't seem so.
I have exactly the same problem with a 1TB TC and my wife's MB C2D. It had some problems backing up for a while (apparently due to all the wireless issues being reported on these discussion boards - and NOT due to DNSchanger, I've checked). After I managed to get it backed up again by plugging in direct and left backing up overnight, it is now reporting that the backup disk is "almost full". However, there's over 450GB of space left and my MacBook Pro, which also backs up to the same TC is not reporting any issues.
If anyone knows what the solution might be, please let me know.
Rgds,
Guy

How to restore the lost free space on my hard drive ? :(

Hey all ...
One week ago, I tried to Install a game ... but while it was installing ... I Forced quit the installing because my macbook froze . I realized that the free space available on my hard drive is less than what it was before ... about 17 GB were gone
I used the " Clean My Mac " app to remove not used and unwanted files but my hard drive free space still the same
So right now i need the best solution from you guys ... and Im thinking to format my macbook but I dont how :P

Welcome to Apple Discussions
Don't rush to reformat and reinstall just yet, grab a copy of Disc Inventory X and see if you can see the unwanted file(s) that's taking the space with that ?

How do i get back my 800gb of lost (free space)

i have a new imac and it has a 3tb fusion drive. i used paralells to port my old computer over to it. the conection went down slightly in to the transfear and now i am left with 800GB of free space on my drive. i can not seem to reclaim this. if i try disk utilaty it wont let me do anything (proably because im on the disk and it cant un-mount) any help would be very nice to get. cheers

You cannot fix anything with Disk Utility unless you run it from the Recovery HD.
Boot Using OPTION+R keys:
1. Restart the computer.
2. Immediately after the chime press and hold down the
"OPTION" and the "R" keys together.
3. Release the keys when the Utilities Menu appears.
Select Disk Utility from the main menu and click on the Continue button.
It would help if you would describe precisely what you were doing and how you were doing it. Your post doesn't provide the information needed to understand your situation.
And, with Disk Utility open it would help to selet the hard drive and click on the Partition tab. Then take a snapshot of the entire DU window to post here - use COMMAND-SHIFT-4; use the crosshairs to select the desired part of the screen and release the mouse button. The image will be saved to your Desktop. Then use the Camera icon in the forum's message window to display the image in your post.

Lost free space after an "Erase Free Space" procedure

I just ran the "Erase Free Space" application from the Dick Utility. The erase failed and now I have ZERO free space available. I am now showing that all 111g or used oposed to roughly 50% prior to the Erase Free Space. I have found a few articles trying to explain what to do but, I have been unable to locate the empty temp files that we created during the Erase Free Space, so I have been told. Can anyone help me resolve this solution and restore my free space?
Thank you,
Shannon

WhatSize should be able to find the temporary files
<http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/>
You could try the Erase Free Space from Disk Utility on the install DVD. It might delete the files when it finishes.

Loss of free space in macbook

Hello recently i used vmfusion and installed windowsXP. Later i ran with few problems with mac and so i restored my macbook to factory setting using the cd i got when i bought mac.
And now my problem is i am not able to recover my lost free space of 6GB.
Can anyone please help me how to do it?
Help will be appreciated.
Thanks..

What do you mean free space of 6 GB? Does more than 1 partition show when you run disk utility?

Lost my contacts and calendar since update and statesThe iPhone cannot be synced because there is not enough free space to hold all of the items in the iTunes library (additional 1 MB required).e

I lost my contacts and calendar, and photos since the iOS update and and it states that my iPhone cannot be synced because there is not enough free space to hold all of the items in the iTunes library (additional 1 MB required). Also it shows that I am over capacity on my Capacity ruler but how do I unload some of that stuff so that I can increase my capacity and perhaps get this synching to work again.
So frustrating!!

On your iPhone go to settings>general>about and next to "Available" if you dont have much space then you will need to delete stuff on the phone to make room to take photos by deleting stuff on the phone.
In terms of syncing change what you are syncing and decide what you would really want and not want on your phone which would make what is syncing to the phone smaller.

Disk utility/erase and lost HD free space

HELP!
In an attempt to clear up space from deleted files I ran the disk utility>erase>erase free space>35-Pass erase deleted files programme. Then did verify disk permissions and repair disk permissions.
Iv now dropped from 7.8GB of free space to 1.8 of free space on the HD. So that things aren't working right. Plus, I can't download music that I bought on iTunes because there isn't enough space on the HD.
How do I get all that space back? What did I do wrong?
All I was doing was trying to free up space from deleted files that Iv been getting rid of. I know that when you delete from one portion of the HD it doesn't always delete it totally off the system only the portion where you're looking at it.
HELP

Do you by any chance have FileVault enabled?

Importing error - HDD free space lost?!!

Hey,
So I had around 9 GB free space on my macbook and, using iPhoto, imported photo's from a camera with a max space of 4GB (it says it had used up around 3.6GB on the card). Near the end of the importing process an alert that I'm running out of disc space appeared, and Finder said i had only 400KB free space left, even though it should have only decreased to a minimum of 5GB!
Then all my applications started to freeze and I was forced to force quit iPhoto before the import had completed and turn off my laptop. After restarting it, there seems to be only 3GB free space left and no photo's have been imported from the camera!
Where have 6GB gone?! Are the photo's filed somewhere and I just can't find them?! And if so, why has it taken up 6GB instead of 3.6GB?!
Thanks in advance!

You're running an overcrowded disk and that's very dangerous.
So I had around 9 GB free space on my macbook
OS X needs about 10 gigs of hard drive space for normal OS operations - things like virtual memory, temporary files and so on. Without this space your Mac will slow down as the OS hunts for space on the disk, files will be fragmented, also slowing things down, apps will crash and the risk of data corruption - that is damage to your files, photos, music - increases exponentially.
Then:
imported photo's from a camera with a max space of 4GB (it says it had used up around 3.6GB on the card
Your assumption that importing 3.6 gigs of material only uses 3.6 gigs is erroneous. In the process of importing temporary files are created and removed as the copying process goes on - that's that whole "temporary files and virtual memory" mention above - so the process of copying your files takes more space than the final requirement, so your disk fills up and then
Then all my applications started to freeze and I was forced to force quit iPhoto before the import had completed and turn off my laptop.
Now when you restart:
Where have 6GB gone?! Are the photo's filed somewhere and I just can't find them?! And if so, why has it taken up 6GB instead of 3.6GB?!
It's taken up that space because of the temporary files and so on. And they're there still because the disk is so full the operating system can't properly clean up after the failed import.
Your first priority is to make more space on that HD. Nothing else can be done until you do. Purchase an external HD and move your Photos and Music to it. Both iPhoto and iTunes can run perfectly well with the Library on an external disk.
Regards
TD

"How do I defrag my mac?" "You don't need to, it does it itself" Fragmented Free Space: 99%. READ THIS NOW

Just a heads up for my fellow Mac users.
"How do I defrag my mac?"
"You don't need to, ever. It does it automatically."
"But it's running really slowly..."
"Repair permissions or something. Defragging is not necessary on a mac."
Techtool pro is now defragmenting my mac. Looks like the job's going to take about 4 hours. I thought I'd give everyone the truth about this while waiting (on a different computer obviously)
The truth is, Apple's defragmenting system ***** BALLS. It has two massive, massive flaws which I feel people urgently need to be made aware of.
#1: It only defragments files up to 20mb. If you're a movie producer, a songwriter, a photographer, or anything which involves working with many massive files, the built in defragmenting program WILL NOT HELP YOU IN THE SLIGHTEST.
#2: It only defragments FILES. Free space is ignored, which eventually causes absolutely hrrendous problems.
Let me give you an analogy here. Imagine your mac's hard drive is a bookcase with lots of books on it.
File fragmentation is when it can't find a gap in the bookcase big enough for the entire book, so it breaks the book into pieces and srotes them in different gaps.
Space fragmentation is when there are gaps all over the bookcase, instead of all the books being pushed to one side so there's a long gap elsewhere.
Apple's built in defragmenting program will only fix the first problem - and even then, it will ignore any book bigger than 20 pages long, if you have bigger books which are broken up, you're screwed.
Why is space fragmentation a problem? It's a problem because it directly LEADS TO file fragmentation. If there is a large block of free space all in one part of the disk, then an entire file can be written to it. However, if there is no single free block big enough for the file, it HAS NO CHOICE but to fragment it.
So basically you might have 5 GB free and want to save a 2GB imovie project. That's cool. But what you may not realize is, the biggest single area of free space is only say 600MB. Others are around 300 and 400. Therefore the file MUST be fragmented into all these different areas, which wouldn't be necessary if all the free space was in one area of the disk.
But apple's built in tools don't do anything about this, at least not in Tiger. PErhaps this has been fixed in later installations but I'm almost certain the same issues exist in leopard.
Your only option is to buy a defragmenting program. I know this ***** but believe me, this IS something you NEED to do if your activity on your laptop involves disk space - intensive projects. I'm using TechTool Pro which has been recommended to me as hands down the best. It has a number of other functions as well, right now I'm only using the defragmenting tools but it has others for repairing damages disk sectors and other mantainence tools. There are other programs such as iDefrag out there as well.
Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you because I experienced mind numbing frustration trying to get answers from the Apple community. Google it or ask the question yourself and you will most likely be whacked in the face with the intro to my post here - "You don't need to, it's not necessary, macs do it themselves, blah blah blah"
Even worse, Apple's own webpage on the subject is nothing short of a disaster. It basically says "You PROBABLY don't need to defragment, unless you work with large files." That's it. You'd expect it to have an extra section saying "If you DO happen to work with large files, here's what you do" but no such section exists. It basically says "You don't need to defrag most of the time, and on the rare occasions when you do, well, too bad, you're screwed."
I urge everyone to heed this or they will be tearing their hair out at how slow their mac has become and the fact that no one will offer any meaningful advice other than the standard, generic, "Repair permissions" - the Mac equivelant of "have you tried turning it off and on again".
My disk is at 99% fragmented free space. NINTEY NINE PERCENT. In other words, although I have 25GB of free space, there was not a single contiguous block on the entire machine. I had almost 5,000 fragmented files as well, mostly imovies. Defragmenting got this down to about 300.
The defrag job is taking more than 4 hours and will probably go on to take a lot longer than that. This machine has been slowly grinding to a halt over the last 3 years and now I know why.
Please don't listen to anyone. Get yourself a defragmenting folder, and email Apple to tell them it's just not good enough to give their customers half assed answers and inadequate basic maintainence tools. Mac OS X must literally be the only operating system out there where something as basic as defragmenting is not only almost impossible to get answers on, but actually costs money to fix once you DO get answers.
As customers, we should not accept this any longer. I intend to spread the above message far and wide.
I LOVE Apple. I've always been "a mac" and I always will be. This in no way a mac bashing post or a windows endorsing one. I wouldn't switch back to windows if you gave me a million euro.
But sometimes even the best developers can royally f*ck up. This is one of them.
There is no readon people should be forced to put up with this crap. Absolutely no reason at all. I've had 3 months of crappy performance with no official explanation whatsoever.
Apple if you're reading this: I love your products. I'm a loyal customer. People are more forgiving than you think, speak up, admit you dropped the ball, and DO something about it in your next updates to Lion and whichever versions of Leopard you are still actively maintaining.
There's no shame in admitting when you're wrong. The shame is in hiding behind false promises and walls of silence.
--Loyal customer, but feeling rather betrayed by all this.

The old rule of thumb was to keep 10-12 GB free. Any lower than that and you will start to have trouble. I was very close to that for a long time and never had any complaints. Now, Lion "encourages" 20% free space (on my newer 250 GB drive) so I try to keep it with more than 50 GB free.
Do you still have the original memory in that machine too? The metal plate you have to remove in the battery compartment also provides access to the RAM. Your machine will take 2 GB of RAM, possibly 3. You definitely want to max that out too.
Regardless, you definitely need a new hard drive. When Apple switched to PC components, they had to take a quality hit. These 2.5" notebook hard drives are not very reliable. I'm surprised your hard drive hasn't died by now. I usually get a new hard drive with every major OS upgrade. A $ 50 investment every couple of years is no big deal.
Unfortunately, you (and I) suffer from being an early adopter in 2006. Those 32-bit machines only accept 2 GB RAM (maybe 3) and are only 32-bit so they can't be upgraded to Lion. Because of this limitation, you won't see as dramatic an improvement as you would with a 2007 machine. If you run more than a couple of applications, your hard drive is always going to have to be doing some VM work. My 2006 machine has even lost its bluetooth. I gave it to my brother. My very similar 2007 Macbook is still running great.
So, you must get a new hard drive because your old one is likely on death's door. If you don't have at least 2 GB - get it. If you can't afford a new machine, you might want to consider an SSD. That might help mitigate your RAM limitations. You can spend from $ 100 to $ 350 and get a dramatic speed improvement.

TS1503 After an update on my iPhone 4, (I updated using my MacBook Pro) I first received the message, iTunes was not able to load all of iTunes library back on your phone, not enough free space on your phone. (not an exact quote, essentially the same mean

The complete iTunes library was already on my iPhone 4. Why would it all not go back on? It left out around 4 or 5 songs from my play list. How do I get them back on my iPhone?
Note: All software on both devices is up to date.
Then, I tried to sync my iPhone to my MacBook Pro. I got the message, cannot sync your iPhone because there is not enough free space in the iTunes library (not exact quote, but same meaning).
I researched how to get more free space on my phone which might 'supposedly' alleviate the above issues. I removed some less used apps, and some photos and videos from my phone. Then, I tried backing up again. I still got the message there wasn't enough free space on my phone, and the missing songs from the iTunes library were not returned to my phone. I gave another try at syncing my iPhone. I still got the same message that the phone couldn't be synced because there wasn't enough free space in the iTunes library.
Any suggestions on how to remedy these problems will be appreciated!
BTW... I read a suggestion on the internet to restore my phone (I did this recently when something went wrong during a phone update and the whole process went 'hey-wire', shutting down before the update was complete. However, at that time, all of my songs and apps were still on my phone and stored in the iTunes library.) If I restore my iPhone now, will the apps and songs no longer on my phone be lost?
Sorry there are so many questions within the same 'New Discussion' thread I'm starting! But, I think all of these issues are somehow related.
Thanks!

I Have fumbled all day to this resolved, I'll run the battery down and see what happens afterwards. This is not good !

IPod cannot be updated because there is not enough free space

iPod cannot be updated because there is not enough free space to hold all of the songs in the iTunes music library. But my iPod does not show any songs. This all strated when I plugged the iPod in to the computer to charge it. I lost my songs on the iPod and cannot update it my play list. My iPod shows up in my iTunes, and show that there is songs there. But why does my iPod not show the songs, it is blank. I have run the gambit today, reset reinstall, updates, the works .... Can anyone please help? I just got this thing and it was working great until this. This has been the most frustrating day I have ever had.

Auto update playlist and music. I tried waht you sugested earlier, and it gave me a diferent message. I have it working, I moved one of the folders out of the iPosd_Control and I am able to see the list in iTunes. One of the songs in the folder could have been corrupted. I thank you for your help. I still do not understand the multi folders. This is a good one for anyone else who gets that message.

Not Enough Free Space on NetBoot Image Partition

Since the NetBoot server isn't all that popular, I'm going to explain how it works a bit before I get into my problem.
I assume everyone knows how it works on the client end. You choose an image and your Mac boots that image over the network. Quick, easy, painless. It's a cool system. So on the server/admin side…
Every version of OS X Server comes with it's own System Imaging Utility. So lets say you want to make a netboot image with some utilities on it. So you take an external hard drive. Make two partitions on it. On one partition, you set it up to be the netboot image. So you install all of the utilities you want installed. You configure all of the preferences just the way you want them. Set your background image, etc, etc. On the other image, you just do a quick clean plain installation of your OS. And you also install your OS X Server Admin tools (or in case of 10.8, the Server app). So once your image-to-be is configured, you boot the second partition, and run the imaging utility. This utility will turn your volume into a netboot image. A netboot image is basically just a folder with some .plists in it, a read-only disk image of your initial volume, and a kernel or two (10.5).
NetBoot images are read-only. So when you boot them, you can make as many changes as you want. But once you shut down, all changes are lost. Every time any mac boots a netboot image, it is booting the image exactly as it was when you made it. The changes you make are stored in shadow files on the server that you can periodically toss, since they are only used during the current active session. Once you reboot, the shadow files are useless.
So here is the problem: When you make a netboot image from a real volume, the utility only leaves a small amount of free space on the volume. Even though the disk image is read only, the amount of free space matters because that's still all you get to use. In other words, if the .dmg file in the netboot image i just made only has 900 MB of free space in the volume, then that's all I get for free space on any machine I boot off that image. Even though the image is read only, and all of the "free space" is actually being stored as shadow files on the server, that limit is still applied. And 900 MB is not very much free space. So you can boot a utilities volume and if a program eats up a lot of ram, that virtual memory can eat up what little free HD space you have, and suddenly your netboot image is not very functional.
Now being the clever fellow that I am, I came up with a solution to this problem last time around. I used the following command to resize the partition (and only the partition) of the .dmg file, inside the netboot image (netboot images are just folders).
hdiutil resize -size 60g -partitiononly NetBoot.dmg
This resized the volumes to 60 GB. But it was all blank space, so the .dmg file's size did not change. It would just mount as a read only volume with 40 GB of free space instead of a few hundred MB. This little trick worked very well. But it's not working any more. I can't figure out why. But every time I try to run this command on the .dmg file, I get an error very similar to the following:
hdiutil: resize request 125829120 is above maximum size 18005952 allowed.
hdiutil: resize: failed. Invalid argument (22)
I get this error while running 10.8, 10.7, or 10.6. I get this error whether I'm trying to resize an image containing 10.8, 10.7, 10.6, 10.5, 10.4 or 10.3. I get this error whether I convert the image to a read/write image first, or even a spare image first. I get this error whether the original hard drive that volumes were on, is partitioned as APM or GUID.
The "maximum size" listed in the error message is different for each image I try to resize. It's as if the tool is trying to fit the increase volume inside the existing free space of the image's volume. Which isn't what I'm trying to do at all.
I've been using netboot images filled with utilities for years now. And overall it works very very well. I started back when the first macbooks came out with no firewire. I quickly realized I needed a better solution than booting my Mac into firewire mode to repair other Macs. And then when I got into it, I realized I could host images of all different OS versions. So now I can plug my MBP into a client's network, and boot any Mac they have off of a utility volume of any version of Mac OS X needed, all the way down to 10.3, all at the same time. And I also have NetInstall volumes too that let me install OS X for all these versions as well. The only real quirk I've had over the years, is this 'free' space issue. In the past (before the last time I updated my images, where I used the command above to resize the partitions and solve the problem), what I've done when I've ran into a HD pinch while working, is to immediately start deleting apps I don't think I'm going to need, right off the netbooted Mac. This frees up space on the netboot volume and the system is happy. And again it's all read only, so I'm not actually making changes to the image itself. One real half assed solution I thought of was to set up all of my netboot volumes as having a 1 GB file in their trash and not emptying it before creating a netboot image from the volume. Then when this problem came up and the OS was running out of disk space, I could just empty the trash. I'm quite sure this little trick would have worked, but it's so half-assed. I'd much rather just have more free space on the mounted disk images.

But how did my command work so perfectly last time? Here's an image. On the left, the info window of the disk image inside my 10.7 Utilities netboot image. On the right, the info window for that disk image's mounted volume. The file is only 7 GB and the volume is a 30 GB volume with ~23 GB free. None of the free space of the volume is using up any actual disk space in the .dmg file. I did this once, there's got to be a way to reproduce this again?
Here's the same thing with my 10.6 Utilities netboot image. Also in case I'm not being clear, these netboot images these screen shots are of, are from the last time I updated my netboot images ~11 months ago. These are not my current batch that I'm trying to finalize.

Can't use 7GB of free space i DO have! what a mess!

hi, im having a quite serious problem with my external HDD. it seems that i lost 7 GB of free space. i dont know how to get them back.
everything started when i tried to install Linux Debian. so i used an app called ipartition to resize my HDD partitions and let 7 GB of free space to let linux get installed. in fact i couldn't install linux (i ignore the reason) and also i cant access my disc partitions any more through ipartition. so i cant resize them any more. and those 7gb of free space are apparently lost by now. i dont know if its something with ipartition app or there is another solution to this. i also use disk studio but it just re partition volumes. but it doesn't show free space on the HDD.
any clue? please i need to recover those GBs!!!!

For older Macs that aren't supported in Firefox 4.0, try TenFourFox for PowerPC's running Mac 10.4.11 & 10.5.8 . <br />
http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
Or you can revert to 3.6.16. <br />
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html

"Lack of free space message" on ipod

ipod shuffle still says "iPod cannot be synced because there is not enough free space to hold all of the selected items," and thats after deleting songs and folders. What can I do?

If your iPod shuffle is 3rd or 4th gen, are you syncing your entire iTunes music library to the iPod? If so, the shuffle can no longer hold your complete iTunes music library; you'll need to set it to sync a portion of your library instead.
A convenient way to do this is to create one or more playlists in your iTunes library, with only the songs you want on the shuffle. Or you can use existing playlists. The total storage used by the songs on these playlists cannot exceed the capacity of the shuffle (2GB if your shuffle is 4th gen).
Select the shuffle in iTunes, so that you see its "management" screen. If you use the new iTunes 12, in the sidebar (along left side of window), under Settings, click on Music. If your iTunes is an earlier version, click on Music in the horizontal bar (toward the top of the window). This shows the iPod's Music screen, where you tell iTunes how to sync songs the shuffle.
The checkbox for Sync Music is probably already checked (if shuffle is currently set to sync your entire iTunes music library). Keep it checked. Below that, the option to sync Entire music library is probably selected now. Change that to the other choice, to sync Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres. Below that, under Playlists, select (checkmark) those playlists with songs you want on the shuffle. You can also select other items on those lists, as desired. The "Capacity Bar" at the bottom of the screen shows you the amount of storage (on the shuffle) your current selections will be using.
Click Apply, and your selection syncs to the shuffle. The current content of the shuffle is replaced (any songs on the shuffle that are not in your computer's iTunes library will be lost). Going forward, to update songs on the shuffle, add songs to and/or remove songs from those playlists that sync to the shuffle, in your iTunes library. The shuffle does not need to be connected. The next time you connect the shuffle (or click Sync if already connected), iTunes syncs the same changes to the shuffle automatically.
If my assumptions about your situation are wrong, please reply back with more info...

Lost Free Space

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