My startup disk is full but I can't find out what takes up all the space..., My startup disk is full but I can't find out what takes up all the space...
Several times I tried to find out what fills up my space but I couldn't figure it out. I have pictures and some real short movies on my mac and maybe 10 word documents that's it. Is it a possibility that I have a virus or something? I'm really not familiar with these kind of things...
Don't remove the entire Application Support folder, it's very important. You may find that there are folders inside belonging to applications which you're sure you won't use - for example, Garageband tends to store a lot of loops there, so you can remove its subfolder if you don't want to use it.
For the Dropbox questions, don't delete subfolders from your Dropbox in the Finder, or they'll be removed from your cloud Dropbox. Either use selective syncing (which should delete the appropriate folders immediately) or uninstall Dropbox completely from your computer (which will retain everything in the cloud).
Matt
Similar Messages
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My startup disk keeps saying it is full and has done for a few moths. I have been through and deleted as much as I can, transferred movies to an external drive and emptied the trash, but it keeps coming up as full again after a while even though I haven't loaed anything else on......what do I do? It is so short of space now that it is saying there isn't enough memory to run some applications?? HELP!! I am new at all this stuff.
It sounds like a runaway process is filling up your volume.
Boot in safe mode. First, disconnect all wired peripherals except keyboard, mouse, and monitor, if applicable, and remove all aftermarket expansion cards. The instructions provided by Apple are as follows:
Be sure your Mac is shut down.
Press the power button.
Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone, but not before the tone.
Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple icon and the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).
The login screen appears even if you usually log in automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin.
Safe mode is much slower to boot and run than normal, and some things won’t work at all, including your login items.
Use a tool such as the one linked below to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space:
OmniDiskSweeper - Products - The Omni Group -
My MacPro says the startup disk is too full. I have 4 internal hard drives that have 2T each so there is plenty of space, but all start up programs, libraries, iTunes and application folder are on the '1st' hard drive. Can I move any to 2nd drive?
Your system will likely fit just fine on a small fast 250GB SSD
What you have is lots of stuff that should not be on the boot drive, data and graphics or media files and libraries that should be moved to another drive.
If you are getting a message like this, STOP, off load files, make room, and make sure to have 15% free or more.
Do not try to move anything from system and its library and sub folders. Move your home user account and just leave the essential home library but move all the rest.
A full drive can have trouble finding free space segments and writing out updates to files and to the directory. And loss of directory means loss of where files are located and their segments. -
Hi All,
Late last year I upgraded from tiger to leopard (very out of date I know) but ever since I have been getting warnings that my startup disk is full. I have deleted loads including pictures and itunes but still get the same mesage. I think when I upgraded the old version was stored somewhere and this might be causing the problem. Does anyone know where I would be able to find and delete - or alternatively have any other suggestions for what the problem may be?
Many thanksWOW
80GB is a very small drive.
Sorry Noondaywitch, but omni disk sweeper isn't going to install in the space remaining, without more problems.
My Suggestions
1. Get a large (400GB+) USB hard drive
2. Copy all the contents of your home directory to the USB drive.
3. Delete all your files from your home directory on your computer after making sure everything transferred ok.
4. Perform a clean (destructive) install of Mac OSX and then the applications you need.
5. Check how much space you have left.
6. If there is less than 50% of the HDD space left (35GB or so), then consider replacing the HDD with a new larger one. If it's a white intel mac book, then this is very easy, and instructions how to do it are included in your 'everything else' wallet with your OSX DVDs etc.
7. If you can't replace the HDD, then it's time to consider a new machine i'm afraid.
Hope this helps
Justin -
I am having problems gettting my mail to work ... Mac telling me that my start up disk id full and to delete some files to free up space ... have done this but when i open mail from the dock it just brings up the colour wheel and nothing happening ... it shows when you right click on the mail icon that " application not responding"
If your hard drive is getting full, you need to free up, at least, 20 GBs of space on your iMac's hard drive.
If your Mac is running a fairly recent version of OS X, here are some general guidelines.
Follow some of my tips for cleaning out, deleting and archiving data from your Mac's internal hard drive.
Have you emptied your iMac's Trash icon in the Dock?
If you use iPhoto, iPhoto has its own trash that needs to be emptied, also.
If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!
Other things you can do to gain space.
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 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.
Download an app called OnyX for your version of OS X.
When you install and launch it, let it run the automatic ans S.M,A.R.T. tests, then go to the cleaning and maintenance tabs and run the tabs that have the ability to 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! -
Hi,
I was wondering if someone can help me. I have a MacBook Pro, it has came up saying I need to free up space on the disk as it full every time it starts up, so I log in and no icons or applications show up on the screen just my background wallpaper, the only thing I can do is the force quit keyboard shortcut but there is nothing to quit, I have tried to start up in safe mode but again there is no icons in the desktop,
I have my disks that came with my laptop I have went into disk utility to repair disk and I still seem to have the same problem .. No icons or apps or anything lol just the cursor I can only shut down the laptop via power but and the press shut down.
Please help I am going out my mind with this thing :(
Thanks x jadeThis can be used to boot the machine and delelte enough files to get it to boot normally.
.Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive
Read about storage drive so you can store your extra stuff.
Most commonly used backup methods
Also here to see how a full boot drive slows the machine down
Why is my computer slow? -
I had closed out of all of my programs but heard the internal fans running so I checked the activity monitor. It shows syslog d as the top process using the CPU right now. I have no idea what that means.
I read a thread about the startup disk being full and how you can free up memory. I have an airport extreme so TimeCapsule is backing up everything. I do have a bunch of pictures on iPhoto on the laptop; could move those to another location but I'm a little gunshy. I know they are on the TimeCapsule but I would like to save them to a second place before deleting from laptop just to be sure. I went through several things yesterday and emptied trash, etc. I wasn't able to locate the hidden files that the thread about the startup disk being full was referencing --- they were talking about large emails that were causing processes to happen taking up the CPU.... I wasn't able to find out if that was the case for me.
Also I'm going to look into getting another 2MB of memory and installing it on the Macbook, so I can upgrade to the latest OS. Anyone have an idea if that is worth the $$$ over buying a new laptop? Or anyone have ideas as to where to buy memory, etc.
Any ideas - help!Go step by step and test.
1. Start up in Safe Mode.
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11212
2. Empty Trash.
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13806
3. Disk space / Time Machine ?/ Local Snapshots
Local backups
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878
4. Delete old iOS Devices Backup.
iTunes > Preferences > Devices
Highlight the old Backups , press “Delete Backup” and then “OK”.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4946?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
5. Re-index Macintosh HD.
This will take a while. Wait until it is finished.
System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409 -
My start up disk Macintosh HD is full on my McAir OSX 10.9.4 memory 4GB. I need to clear the disk so that I can update it with the new software IOS 10.9.5 requiring 2.05GB. Need guidance on how to clear space.
For information about the Other category in the Storage display, see this support article. 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—not the mythical 10%, 15%, or any other percentage. 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. -
I have a Macbook pro and a new hard disk was installed last march. Today, I have a message telling me that my disk is full and that I can't save anything. But when I checked my disk to see if I have any space left, it shows 170 go of free space!!!
I have deleted some films, juste to make sure but that did not work...
What can I try to see where the problem is?
ThanksDownload the Windows Installer CleanUp utility from the following page (use one of the links under the "DOWNLOAD LOCATIONS" thingy on the Major Geeks page):
http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4459
To install the utility, doubleclick the msicuu2.exe file you downloaded.
Now run the utility ("Start > All Programs > Windows Install Clean Up"). In the list of programs that appears in CleanUp, select any Bonjour entries and click "Remove", as per the following screenshot:
Quit out of CleanUp, restart the PC and try another install. Does it go through this time? -
I try to buy songs itunes but there is a message stating that my disk is full and to empty out the trash can. But i don't know what disk it speaks of?
The "disk" is your startup volume, which is usually called "Macintosh HD" (unless you changed it). Your iTunes media files (such as song files), and basically everything else, are stored on that volume (unless you changed it).
You should create some free space as soon as possible, because the system (OS) and applications use free space to write temporary files as part of normal operations. If there is very little free space available, your system may start to bog down and feel slow because it's not running efficiently.
You can empty whatever is currently in the Trash by doing a click-hold (or right-click) on the "waste basket" icon in the Dock, and selecting Empty Trash. A good place to look for files you may no longer need is your Downloads folder. There is usually a link to your Downloads folder in the sidebar of a Finder window. (The folder itself is located in your user home folder.)
You can see how much free space you currently have by selecting Macintosh HD on your Desktop (or in the sidebar of a Finder window), and selecting Get Info from the File menu. You can also right-click on it and select Get Info from the menu that comes up (or hit Cmd-I on keyboard). The Info window shows Capacity and Available for the volume. Available is the free space. It would be best to keep Available at least 10% of Capacity; getting it to 20% or more would be better.
If you can't free up enough free space by deleting things you do not need anymore, you should get an external hard drive and save some your files there. That's actually how I run my iMac; most of my user files are stored on external USB and FireWire drives. -
My macbook air won't load. Says start up disk is full but I can't get the home page to open
My Macbook air won't load. Says the start up disk is full but won't open the home page so I can do anything about it
Step 1
The first step in dealing with a startup failure is to secure the data. If you want to preserve the contents of the startup drive, and you don't already have at least one current backup, you must try to back up now, before you do anything else. It may or may not be possible. If you don't care about the data that has changed since the last backup, you can skip this step.
There are several ways to back up a Mac that is unable to start. You need an external hard drive to hold the backup data.
a. Start up from the Recovery partition, or from a local Time Machine backup volume (option key at startup.) When the OS X Utilities screen appears, launch Disk Utility and follow the instructions in this support article, under “Instructions for backing up to an external hard disk via Disk Utility.” The article refers to starting up from a DVD, but the procedure in Recovery mode is the same. You don't need a DVD if you're running OS X 10.7 or later.
b. If Step 1a fails because of disk errors, and no other Mac is available, then you may be able to salvage some of your files by copying them in the Finder. If you already have an external drive with OS X installed, start up from it. Otherwise, if you have Internet access, follow the instructions on this page to prepare the external drive and install OS X on it. You'll use the Recovery installer, rather than downloading it from the App Store.
c. If you have access to a working Mac, and both it and the non-working Mac have FireWire or Thunderbolt ports, start the non-working Mac in target disk mode. Use the working Mac to copy the data to another drive. This technique won't work with USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth.
d. If the internal drive of the non-working Mac is user-replaceable, remove it and mount it in an external enclosure or drive dock. Use another Mac to copy the data.
Step 2
You might be able to start up in safe mode even though you can't start up normally. Otherwise, start up from an external drive, or else use the technique in Step 1b, 1c, or 1d to mount the internal drive and delete some files. 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. -
Why can't I get the full amount of hard disk space when I reformat?
I have a 750 GB external Western Digital. I reformatted it using extended journaled setting. When it's all ready to go why do I only get 700 GB available as free space and not the full 750 GB? What is occupying the remaining 50 GB? I guess I could understand a gig or two that I couldn't use, but 50 GB, that's 15% of the disk!!!!
Thank youGets asked frequently....
500GB = 465GB too. Or 1000GB = 933GB.
Then, you will find the last inner tracks are drastically slower than the outer 1/3, too. So chop some off for performance.
699GB is 'normal.' The new WD 640GB Caviar = 599GB, great drive and seems slightly faster than the 750GB due to higher density recording.
You can build your own and choose the drive and case that meets your needs, and avoid the vendor 'tax' or WD "features" and go with a Oxford based FW/USB/eSATA cases. -
Disk is full, but I can't find the file(s) that fill it.
When I got to my computer this morning it's root partition was full. That partition is over 400G and when I left the computer last night it was nowhere even close to full.
I spent a moment trying to find the files that filled the disk. I tried `du / | sort -n` This tells me the space is taken up by /home/dave. However, there are no files in that directory that would account for all that space. (du reports the directory is ~400G, but reports no files that would account for the space)
Then I rebooted the machine. Then suddenly my space was available again.
What's going on? I'm puzzled and confused.
I should mention that the root partition is EXT3 on top of LVM on top of RAID1, as described http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … AID_or_LVM. Is there a bug in this?
-Dave
[dave@starbuck ~]$ uname -a
Linux starbuck 2.6.26-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Sep 9 09:56:28 UTC 2008 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
[dave@starbuck ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/grande-root
422G 12G 390G 3% /
none 1006M 0 1006M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/venti-media
447G 22G 403G 6% /mnt/media
/dev/md1 92M 17M 70M 20% /boot
(the `df -h` above is after reboot. Sorry I don't have a copy of the before reboot, but it showed 400G used on /)I can't recall the exact details, but I remember some disk usage going crazy on one of my own machines. 'du' was reporting more than 'ncdu' (an excellent package in the AUR that combines du and ncurses) or whatever similar tool I was using to see if du's craziness was correct (which it wasn't, of course).
I don't exactly remember what I did to fix it, but I think I rebooted and everything fixed itself.
I'm really venturing out here since my memory of this is so vague, but I might have had a (supposedly) full partition too, but I can't remember that part all that much.
And I run JFS without anything fancy (like RAID or LVM), so there are filesystem-independent issuez somewhere...
-dav7
Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-08 18:13:39) -
I have tried updating my apps and software but it says my startup disk or hard disk is full. I deleted a lot of files and apps but they won't be erased from the trash. Please help.
For information about the Other category in the Storage display, see this support article. If the 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
In Photos:
File ▹ Show Recently Deleted ▹ Delete All
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—not the mythical 10%, 15%, or any other percentage. 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 a photo or iTunes library will corrupt the library. Changes to such a 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.
Install the app 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.
For ODS:
security execute-with-privileges /A*/OmniDiskSweeper.app/*/M*/* 2>&-
For GP:
security execute-with-privileges /A*/GrandPerspective.app/*/M*/* 2>&-
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 and start typing the name.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing command-V. You'll be prompted for your login password.
The application window will open behind other open windows. When you scan a volume, the window will eventually show 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. -
The Startup Disk is almost full, I can't update.
I'm a high-school student, I got my MACBOOK pro 15-inch about a year and a half ago.
I've loved it ever since lately, I can't update things. So I keep crashing and the reason I can't update things is because my 'start up disk is full'.
I've done searches on this discussion board but it seems when I type in start up disk it shows it like it's a DISK.
I'm really confused here, and no I'm not MACchallenged, I'm just Leopard OSX challenged I guess.
I really don't like the update.
I wish I never got Leopard, the photobooth ***** now.
It's slow and it pauses. But maybe this is because my 'startupdisk' is almost full. And I need to free memory.
But what is that anyways?
HELP!You need at least 15% free space on your hard drive. So, the solution is to remove files. Get an external hard drive and begin.
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