Running Out of Space... Help!

The hard drive on my 250 GB Macbook is almost full (I have 1 GB left). My 500 GB external hard drive is almost full (I have 23 GB left and it requires 27 GB to do the daily back-up). Without buying a new laptop with a bigger hard drive and without buying a larger external hard drive, what can I do? One thought-- I could clear my external hard drive and then do a complete Time Machine back-up from my laptop to the external hard drive, which should take up only 250 GB of the 500GB external hard drive. After that, I could then delete from my laptop hard drive about 80 GB of movies (many of which reside in iPhoto). Does that strategy/sequence make sense? Are there any dangers to this other than a power failure while I am doing the transfer from the laptop to the external hard drive?
If the above strategy/sequence makes sense...
(1)How do I delete what is currently on the external hard drive (without having to re-format it)?
(2)How do I quickly find all of the movie files in iPhoto that I will want to delete from my laptop hard drive after they are backed up on the external hard drive? Is there a way to do this short of going through each album and deleting the videos one-by-one?
(3)In the future, if I want to access some of the videos that reside only on the external hard disk, how do I search for them... will they stay in the albums from iPhoto? How do I open them from the external hard drive?
Thanks in advance for any time/help/suggestions you can offer on this...

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' Storage Display.
2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
6. See The Storage Display.
You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.
You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

Similar Messages

I keep on getting this error when i try to copy files to my 2T Time Capsule, Please help im running out of space on my MacBook Pro.... The operation can't be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -50)

I keep on getting this error when i try to copy files to my 2T Time Capsule, Please help im running out of space on my MacBook Pro....
The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -50)

I would get an external drive today and copy all your stuff off the TC.. forget trying to load more onto it. There is a good chance after 3years (A 2TB should be only about 2years tops), the disk or the TC itself is on the way out. Do it immediately. If TM is also failing to backup you need to recognise symtoms of impending doom.
Unfortunately the error messages are archane and it is hard to discover their meaning.
You also cannot verify a network drive.. you can verify the TM sparsebundle though so do that.
A5. http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Reboot the whole network from off.. certainly if you run later OS it can simply lose the drive..
If you still fail to be able to copy to the TC.. then get that external and copy off it. Tell us if you can do that.

Help! I'm running out of space for my operating system.

I keep getting a message that my operating system is running out of space. I have 1.05 GB free. I'm not a novice with Mac, but do know Windows better. I would be happy to clean up my disk, but am not sure how to do it or if I can find a way to expand my memory.....
Any help?

louisak,
Welcome to the Apple Discussions!
A startup hard drive showing 1 GB free on an computer running a flavor of Unix (which OS X is) can indeed be effectively running out of room. Unix makes heavy use of scratch and swap files on the hard drive; the amount of needed swap space varies depending on how much real RAM you have and how manu programs you run concurently, but 256 to 512 MB swap spac eon disk is common (this Mac currently shows 256 MB for 3 swap files in /private/var/vm even through only 72 MB of that is in use). In addition, if you burn -R or -RW optical discs, you'll need at least as much free space as the size of the dissc to allow creation of the temporary image file used in the burning, about 700 MB for CD-R and 4.7 GB for DVD-R. As a ballpark rule-of-thumb, minimum free hard drive space should be at least 1 GB (no optical disc burning), 2 GB (CD-R burning), or 5 GB (DVD-R burning), so the warning message you're seeing is expected.
It's critical that you free up space on the hard drive as soon as possible. In the interim, close out any programs you're not immediately using and try yo run no more than one program at a time. If a Unix computer does run out of hard drive space, it can be blocked from normal startup and leave you looking at booting into single-user mode to manually clear enough files to start up again.
There are a number of ways to free up hard drive space, depending on your comfort level rooting around the OS X System, how valuable your files are, and your budget. There are several utilities that can help you ID unneeded large files, but I'd be hesitant to download anything onto your computer until you free up at least 2 GB to work with. Start by going through your user data and trashing files you don't really need.
If you use Firefox, check the ~/Users/ [username]/ Library/ Application Support/ Firefox/ Profiles/ [text].default/ folder for excess backup bookmarks files (bookmarks-##.html); thise can take up about 1 MB each and you don't really need more than the latest backup (when I last checked my work Mac, there were about 200 backup bookmarks files, so that's a fair chunck of drive space).
Continue with the tips at The X-Lab's Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk. The easiest way by far to free up space on the startup drive is to add an external Firewire drive and move your iTunes / iPhoto libraries and other user date to that drive, then delete the originals from the startup hard drive. See How to move the iPhoto Library Folder to a new location and Moving your iTunes Music folder. The localization tips in the X-Lab link can also free up a significant amount of space, but pay heed to the warnings about not deleting things unless you know what it is you're deleteing, especially when it comes to System-level items.
If you've ever experienced a crash, especially while tring to burn a CD-R or DVD-R, there may be normally temporary files left behind on the hard drive. You can use a utility like OnyX and use it to clear temporary files, logs and caches and (especially) core files. (In Unix, a core file is a snapshot of the system at the time of a crash and is useful for code debugging, but unless you have a debugger installed the core files just take up space.)
Another useful utility is Whatsize, which lets you check file sizes. Use this to look for files ending in .tmp and the like. If you ID files you suspect can be trashed but aren't sure, post back witht he file's name and check in the Discussions for anyone who can say "sure, that's safe to trash" or "no, leave it alone". when trashing files, you can move things to the Trash but hold off emptying the Trash for a while to check that the computer operates normally.

Ipad 2 - 30gb and running out of space, but i don't have that many movies - can anyone help

ipad 2 - 30gb and running out of space, but i don't have that many movies - can anyone help? How do i find a directory of files that I can manage (PC user)?
thanks!

You might have to do some experimenting from iTunes on your computer.
Several months back, I had a phantom 5G of video. I unchecked ALL video files and synced the iPad and the 5G was still there. I was able to delete the 5G and bring it back by repeatedly unchecking and checking the "Sync Movies" box.
A "Restore" solved my problem. Be forewarned that it's not quick:
Connect via cable to the computer that you use for sync. From iTunes, select the iPad/iPod and then select the Summary tab. Follow directions for Restore and be sure to say "yes" to the backup. You will be warned that all data (apps, music, movies, etc.) will be erased but, as the Restore finishes, you will be asked if you wish the contents of the backup to be copied to the iPad/iPod. Again, say "yes."

Wedding photography running out of space. Need help with thousands of photos, and workflow

So my studio does wedding photography. Me and my partner both take photos. We have about 30,000 photos just from the last 2 years. We are running out of space big time. We both have 1 terabyte magnetic hard drives in our computers. I have about 80gb left and she has about 120gb left. Needless to say, since I myself take about 50gb of photos per wedding, I'm not going to last long. We use lightroom.
So far I have managed to backup everything on an external 2TB hard drive for both of us. I save both RAW and Jpegs to it. I also have everything backed up on an online server. So here's my first issue. What I've been doing, is for the previous year (completed weddings) I delete all the RAWs from the computers. I leave the JPEG's on the computer incase I need them quickly. I keep all the RAWS on the external hard drives and online. But even doing this, deleting the RAWs from completed weddings off the internal hard drives, I'm still almost out of space. My computer is so slow because of this even though it's a top of the line computer with 6 gigs of triple channel ram. Lightroom runs so very slow and lags so bad.
So my first question is: By deleting the raws off of my computer, if I need to go back a few years from now and re-save the raw files or re-edit, will lightroom remember my develop settings or will I have to completely re-edit every photo? I have been saving a catalog file for each year, and start a new one every year. I do not use XMP sidecar files I save everything to the lightroom database. As long as I have the catalog file backed up, am I safe? Or am I doing this wrong? Because if open an old catalog file, it will say all the photos are not found on my computer (obviously).
My second question is: I am going to be investing in more hard drives and want to do it right this time around. I want to invest in SSD drives for maximum performance. Here is what my plan is. One SSD drive for windows/programs, one SSD drive for lightroom scratch disk, and one 1TB "Velociraptor" 10,000rpm magnetic hard drive for keeping the actual images on. Is this not right? Am I planning this out wrong?
Here is our current workflow. I am very welcome to suggestions:
1) Shoot wedding.
2) Import RAW files from CF card to computer. It goes in a folder for the client with the images going into different sub folders by category such as "reception" and "ceremony"
3) Import folder into lightroom4.
4) Edit photos. I do not use XMP sidecar, I use database.
5) Export files in JPEG form into the same client folder.
6) At the end of the year I save the catalog, make a new catalog for the new year. I delete the RAW files off of my hard drive after backing them up on 2TB external hard drive. I leave the jpegs and the client's folder on the computer hard drive.

My guess is that you are not actually deleting the original raws from your internal hard drives and have lots and lots of crud around that you are not aware off so you should go through your internal drives with a fine-toothed comb. Don't forget to actually empty the trash when you delete! 1TB is more than enough disk space for storing the Lightroom catalog file, previews and some jpegs. 30.000 photos is really not that much. My main catalog has >50.000 images in it with the raw files all stored on external hard drives. The catalog itself is on my internal 256 GB SSD HD that also houses the previews (so I can use it with the raw files offline) and the operating system as well as a lot of software (photoshop, office, iWorks, Aperture, etc.). It is more than enough space as it still has more than 150 GB free. I automatically back up everything, including the external HD that stores the raw images to separate external HDs stored in different places.

Running out of space on /... Help Please

Hi,
I am running out of space on /.
I have a drive in there on /export/home/ which has 18gigs free. Is there anyway I can map / to there and also keep all of my files that are in / like spreading it accross 2 drives... I dont plan on reinstalling the machine cos thats a pain. Its an Ultra5 and it takes ages to install solaris 10.
Rob

I had the same problem - made my root partition too small at first. Someone told me to use LiveUpgrade to create a second boot environment with a new partition table. It worked great, now I'm running off the 2nd BE, which is just the way I should have partitioned if the first place. It went like this:
First, you needed to partition and label the disk that will be acting as the new BE.
Then, create the first BE (-c be1) on the current device, copy the data on the specified filesystem to the second BE (be2), which is created with the �n option:
root #> lucreate -c be1 \
-m /:/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s0:ufs \
-m -:/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s1:swap \
-m /var:/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s3:ufs \
-m /lawson/usr:/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s4:ufs \
-m /opt:/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5:ufs \
-n be2 root #> luactivate be2
root #> init 6
If you've already put your current slices under SVM or Veritas it will require additional steps to get the new slices under control as well.

I think im running out of space..my comp says pls update can anyone help?

how do i know if im running out of space? my comp is 40 gb hd..will i be able to have two libraries on my computer??
thank you for your help

First the actual library files for iTUnes usually only take about 2 to 5 MB of space. iTUnes will only use one library but there are programs that will create 2 librarys for iTUnes to use.
Now for the message your getting, is it windows giving the message or do you get it when you open iTUnes?
40GB is kinda small these days, you might want to start looking at some cheap bigger internal drives or an external one

Can you archive old calendar items in Entourage so you don't run out of space on your Blackberry?

Hi everyone,
I have a Sprint Pearl 8130 and I am syncing with PocketMac to Entourage 2004 on an iBook G4 running OS 10.3.
Most of my syncing issues are minor (for some reason, in contacts, work and home email addresses switch fields, but I can live with that) and I don't have too many complaints about PocketMac for now....
My question is - Does anyone know how to archive old calendar items so that my Blackberry doesn't run out of space? I have calendar items going back to the beginning of 2008. I don't need past calendar items on my Blackberry, except for reoccurring items, like birthdays and such, and maybe a month's worth of old appointments just for reference. My Blackberry has run out of space a couple of times and when it deletes the appointments from my Blackberry, syncing wants to either delete from the Mac or restore to the Blackberry. I know you can do this with a Palm and their Palm software, since I used to have one and I was able to archive items older than a week. Then you would be able to access them in a separate archive profile.
I have searched everywhere and the closest thing I can find is to purchase Missing Sync and set to match my sync date range. https://support.markspace.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=327. But that doesn't really solve my issue of running out of space on my Blackberry. The other thing that I could think of is to export the calendar items into a .rge file, then delete the calendar items from there, sync, and have PocketMac remove items from my Blackberry, but it would be a pain to easily access old calendar items.
I appreciate any thoughts, ideas and especially solutions!

I have the exact opposite issue you mentioned
my client wants his archived calender items to be synched to his 8830 world wide ed.
he is running RIM software (DesktopManager) v 6.4
BES 2007
current issue is that his archived old calendars are not synchronizing to his handheld; we tried to force his PC to synch those items manually through cable, which didn't help, since our BES policy force waireless synch policy to the device and wireless synch never can see the archived items files
I think if you can set the option on your device so it turns on the calendar wireless synch, and also make sure MAC does not select archive to synch
Calendar > Options > General settings or /Wireless synch set to ON;
if you running BES set Calendar Wireless synch off

Time Machine keeps running out of space

This is really annoying. Starting about 2-3 months ago, my Time Machine suddenly keeps running out of space. I have a MacBook Pro bought in 2009 summer with 500 GB Hard Drive. My Time Machine drive is als 500 GB. I currently have 117 GB left in my MacBook's hard drive, and 65 GB left in my Time Machine's drive.
As of this moment my Time Machine only have 1 backup that was done Yesterday. It's trying to create a new backup, but can't because apparently it needs 69 GB while I only have 65 GB.
Why does it need 69 GB? I can't imagine a reason why. I haven't downloaded anything more than 1 GB, if even that much, most likely not, and all I do on this MacBook is pretty much browsing. In any case, it's hard to imagine there's a 69 GB data change between yesterday and today. That's a lot of data by any standard.
Thanks for any help!

If your internal disk is 500GB with 117GB free then you are using 383GB
and your Time Machine disk is too small. It is recommended that your
Time Machine disk is 2 to 3 times bigger than the data you are backing up.
There are also some tools you can get that will display details from the
logs to show you what is being backed up, it may be worth getting one of
those to determine why the backup is so big. I think the first thing you
should do is get a bigger disk.
Dave

Hp stream running out of space due to windows updates.

So having had my stream 14 for a few months now it was in need of a clean up and so I decided to factory reset it and discovered a serious issue regarding lost drive space caused by windows updates.
In factory shipped condition, the system uses some sort of system that accesses the recovery partition to use the data on the WIM I believe, either way whatever it is doing is quite clever and leaves the system with a farly impressive 19.3GB of free space left over, however this situation rapidly degrades once windows starts to update itself.
Allowing Windows 8.1 X64 to update to the last available 'important' update reduces the available free space down to 10.8GB, that's a massive (when taken in context of how much is available) 8.5GB of space gone just by windows performing what are supposed to be important updates, not sure how much worse it will get with time either as it appears that any updated files are expanded to fill the available space rather than stored in the WIM image.
Do HP consider it uneccesary to update windows or are they going to take action to somehow rectify the situation by maybe providing an updated system image that will allow a more recent updated version of windows to be used in the same manner the original installation was? Or is there something I can do to perform this function?
Any ideas?

@Dano314 ,
Hello and thank you for posting on the HP support forums. The updates are put out there to resolve issues.
If you find you are running out of space. Consider using an external hard drive. The hard drive on your system is not made for huge file storage and so on.
On the other hand if you find your system is running ok then do updates when you seem to find you are running into issues.
Thanks again for posting and have a great day.
Please click the "Thumbs Up" on the bottom right of this post to say thank you if you appreciate the support I provide!
Also be sure to mark my post as “Accept as Solution" if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others who face the same challenge find the same solution.
D5GR
I work on behalf of HP

I want to know how to backup my library to a fixed backup drive rather than to a CD or DVD. I mostly have audiobooks in the library and my computer is running out of space. There are so many that copying them to a CD or DVD would be a horrendous waste of

I want to know how to backup my library to a fixed backup drive rather than to a CD or DVD. I mostly have audiobooks in the library and my computer is running out of space. There are so many that copying them to a CD or DVD would be a horrendous waste of time and resources. Can you please help me?

msscott69 wrote:
I want to know how to backup my library to a fixed backup drive
Copy your ENTIRE iTunes FOLDER to an External Drive...
Full Details Here > http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1751
Also... Have a look at these 2 Videos...
http://macmost.com/moving-your-itunes-library.html
http://macmost.com/moving-your-itunes-media-to-an-external-drive.html

Itunes storage says i got 4172 photos, but i actually only have 1359 photos in my photo library. Im running out of space because of it.

i updated my iphone to ios8, but it needs 5 gb so i saved my photos to my windows pc and deleted everthing. When im finally updated, i synced my iphone to itunes and all my photos are saved to my phone which are 3000 photos (rounded) and so i screencaptured only 1000 photos so that it can be saved to my photo library and i un-synced my photos so that they are also deleted from my phone because i dont need them anymore. Now i am running out of space because the storage says i got 4172 photos but i only have 1359 showing in my photo library.

Open Settings->General->Date & Time. Turn off Set Automatically & roll back the date a year. Then open your photos app & the Recently Deleted folder. The phantom photos should be there. Tap Select & Delete All,
Now go back to Settings->General->Date & Time & toggle Set Automatically back on.
Hope this helps!

Oracle 10g RAC implementation running out of space

I have an Oracle RAC implementation setup on a Sun Storagetek 6140 for storage. I have allocated 100gb of space to Oracle but am constantly running out of space during operations. I know that i can allocate additional disk space using Common Array Manager for the Storagetek. How do i get ASM to recognize the fact that there is additional space available to it?

Hi buddy,
How do i get ASM to recognize the fact that there is additional space available to it?You have two options:
1- The first one is create a new LUN, configure it at the OS level and add the disk to disk group.
alter diskgroup add disk '<DISK_DEVICE_PATH>';
2- The second one is increasing the LUN size (if possible, of course) and resize the disk.
alter diskgroup <DISK_GROUP_NAME> resize disk '<DISK_NAME>' <NEW_SIZE>;
Hope it helps,
Cerreia

Bootcamp (C:) running out of space

My bootcamp (C:) is running out of space. I am down to less than 100mb. Is there a way to re-partition my bootcamp (C:) to add more space? I have Windows 7 on the (C:) and Snow Leopard on the (E:). There is plenty of space on the Snow Leopard side, and so I was hoping to add 10GB to the Windows 7 (bootcamp) side.
I would also like to not lose any data from either side, especially from my Outlook. Is this possible?
Also, not sure if this matters, but a few of my applications I downloaded directly from my University website (Acrobat Professional 9) and don't have the install disc.
I am a novice when it comes to computers, and would appreciate any help.
Thank you.

you can try a few things but you really need a much larger parition if you're gaming
how much ram do you have? if at least 8gb, you should try disabling hiberation and the pagefile (google for both); others will tell you to leave the pagefile at 1gb, you can, but i haven't had any issues disabling both on over 20 machines since 2008.
even if you disable both of these, a 35-40gb partition is too small for gaming. i'd target 60-100gb depending on how large of a HD you have

Running out of Space on HDD?

Running out of space on HDD. "About this Mac" says I have over 99gigs of "movies." I can not find these files to remove them. They are not in imovie, iTunes, or iPhoto, nor in the movies document section. How can I free up this space? I have emptied the trash can several times, and I am usually the "Above average" computer user, but I can not find these files anywhere.
Please help.

Hello,
The Western Digital Blue WD7500LPCX is a 750GB 5400RPM 2.5" HDD that is 7mm high. If you need more capacity, you will need to go with a 7mm high SSD, which are available in a capacity of 1TB.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
I am a volunteer and neither a Lenovo nor a Microsoft employee. • Dexter is a good dog • Dexter je dobrý pes
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Watching youtube cause storage running out of space on android, can you do sth. about it?

I believe because of sandbox on android, the internal storage of the phone is running out of space. I tried to put firefox on sdcard, but it does not solve the issue of flash video caching. It is still collected on the main storage, which typically is very limited. Eventually I have to clear private data after viewing few longer videos, can you solve this? e.g. by putting cache of flash videos to sdcard?

Please make sure Flash plug-in in Firefox is doing the playback (so the issue is for Mozilla and Adobe) and not the Youtube app, I mean, there is always the option to load the video in Flash player or Youtube default app.
AFAIK, YouTube Android app does not store cache in internal memory if a SD card is available, because I have a Android phone with few internal memory but it works. So try to play the video from YouTube app. Despite I hardly ever play videos from Firefox Android and don't have the phone to try now, I think you can choose between playing the video from Firefox or from Youtube app. To do so, please, restore all defaults (Go to System Settings > Applications > Manage Applications and choose to restore default associations in Youtube, Firefox and Flash Player apps) then try to play the video again.
If you still want Firefox developers to do something over this, please remember the people who answer questions here, for the most part, are other Firefox users volunteering their time (like me), not Mozilla employees or Firefox developers.
If you want to leave feedback for Firefox developers, you can go to the Firefox ''Help'' menu and select ''Submit Feedback...'' or use [https://input.mozilla.org/feedback this link]. (You'll need to be on the latest version of Firefox to submit feedback). Your feedback gets collected at http://input.mozilla.org/, where a team of people read it and gather data about the most common issues.

Running Out of Space... Help!

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