"startup disk full" message-recommend 'cleaning' software please?

What's the safest way to 'clean' my MacBookPro - to make room for startup disk... I've heard terrible things about MacKeeper. Your recommendations please!

Running maintenance tasks and freeing up disk space are two different things.
Right or control click the MacintoshHD icon. Click Get Info. In the Get Info window you will see Capacity and Available. Make sure you have a minimum of 15% free disk space.
Avoid MacKeeper.
Let your Mac do maintenance for you. No third party utillty apps required.
Mac OS X: About background maintenance tasks
As for making more space available, help here > Freeing Up Hard Disk Space - Mac Guides

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I keep getting "startup disk full" message even when I already moved all my files/documents to an external hard disk

Dear all,
What should I do? I keep getting the "startup disk full" message even when I already moved all my files and documents to an external hard disk.
Thanks a heap.

For information about the Other category in the Storage display, see this support article.
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 reboot. 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. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of your 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.
If you're using Time Machine to back up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of files you've recently deleted. 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.
See this support article for some simple ways to free up storage space.
You can more effectively use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) to explore your 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.
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 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 ODS in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click anywhere in the 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
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 (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. 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.
The application window will open, eventually showing all files in all folders, sorted by size with the largest at the top. It may take a few minutes for ODS to finish scanning your files.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything while running ODS 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 ODS, quit it and also quit Terminal.

ITunes, iPhone startup disk full messages

Since I got my iPhone 3G 2 weeks ago I have started getting "Startup Disk Full" messages. I then noticed that if iTunes is running, not downloading anything or searching for anything my remaining drive space starts to reduce until the messages. If I reboot this will give me back anywhere from 1 GB to 3 GB of drive space. I used to go for months without rebooting now I can't go a day. What would cause this? iTunes 8.0.2, OSX 10.5.5, iPhone OS2.2, Powerbook G4 1Ghz, 160GB drive, 1GB ram.

open up iTunes to see what is taking up the space.. is it applications/Media/Photos and delete appropriately. If not then you might have just hit a bug or installed some bad application.

My startup disk is full?!?! This has been happening for a while and I have dumped 4500 jepegs from iPhoto onto an external drive to try and free up space. I am still recieving the "Startup disk full" message. What more can I do?!?!

My startup disk is full?!?! This has been happening for a while and I have dumped 4500 jepegs from iPhoto onto an external drive to try and free up space. I am still recieving the "Startup disk full" message. What more can I do?!?!

Did you empty the Trash?
What size hard drive & how much free space. You should always have a minimum of 10-15% or more free space?
 Cheers, Tom

Startup Disk Full Message Keeps Occuring

I'm new at maintaining our Xserve here at work. It seems that each day the serevr gets incapacitated because the Startup Disk space fills up. I keep deleting log files and other files that are temporary, but to no avail. I can free a Gig or 2 then a day or two alter it's full again. Is there something wrong with the configuration?

You found a disk-full message and, well, piled onto the thread. OK. There's a decent shot that there is no connection to the previous disk-full error, too. If you lift the hood and look at the Unix layers, there are a large number of files being written, and many differing triggers for general or for excessive disk consumption.
As was mentioned earlier in the thread, this likely isn't specific to Xserve hardware, and this is probably a generic Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server issue, too; something occurring within the Unix layer of the platform. Something writing a log. Caching. A run-away process. Etc.
Get the [Grand Perspective tool|http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net> as a start. That can show you where your space is going.
Also launch Terminal.app and use the shell commands:
find / -size 1k -print+
sudo du -sHh /*
mdfind 'kMDItemFSSize > 10000000'
The first shows files larger than 1K, the second shows disk space. There are commands around to sort this stuff, too; to rank your use as output by du. That last one, the mdfind command, is a (fast) Mac search command that works reasonably well as part of a pipe.
And 150 gigabytes? That's comparatively tiny. I'm running 750 GB drives on servers that are now three years old. Go get yourself actual disk storage devices. Smaller drives can sometimes be used for high performance, but SSD is infiltrating that usage. The tiny SAS disks that were sold with various Xserve boxes were built for speed and bandwidth (as HDDs go), and aren't so good for storage or for sharing the operating system installation with, for instance, users.
And if it's log files, have a look at what's going on as - as is typical with many of these cases - the log can be filling because there's an error somewhere. And the specific trigger for the error can by most anything. Do your due diligence as a Unix server administrator and find your big file(s) and have a look at what's going on with your Unix server, in other words.
Also try a few Google searches, as this problem is a common one, and there are any number of discussions around of various find and du and mdfind and other commands that can be used here. It'd be nice if there was an integrated and GUI-friendly mechanism within Mac OS X, but that's not available; it's add-on or Unix shell commands for now...

Getting Startup Disk Full message since downloading new Safari update

I downloaded the new Safari update a few days ago… it took ages to do and whenever I now try to use Safari I get the Pinwheel of Death after about two minutes and then a message telling me my startup disk is full. It won't let me acknowledge the message or force-quit from Safari – I have to switch off at the button and restart.
All I have on my MacBook are 15 Word documents and the Applications it shipped with (in fact I’ve actually dumped some in an attempt to clear space, as ell as dumping the cache folders)… I only use it to surf the net in the evenings and have no music or pictures on it.
I'm not having this problem at all when using Firefox. Is it possible the update has a bug?

You really need a bit more space than that, but try a bit of maintanance:
Repairing permissions is important, and should always be carried out both before and after any software installation or update.
Go to Disk Utility (this is in your Utilities Folder in your Application folder) and click on the icon of your hard disk (not the one with all the numbers).
In First Aid, click on Repair Permissions.
This only takes a minute or two in Tiger, but much longer in Leopard.
Background information here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751
and here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302672
An article on troubleshooting Permissions can be found here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2963
By the way, you can ignore any messages about SUID or ACL file permissions, as explained here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448?viewlocale=en_US
If you were having any serious problems with your Mac you might as well complete the exercise by repairing your hard disk as well. You cannot do this from the same start-up disk. Reboot from your install disk (holding down the C key). Once it opens, select your language, and then go to Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Select your hard disk as before and click Repair.
Once that is complete reboot again from your usual start-up disk.

"Startup Disk full" message

I keep getting a message that my startup disk is full and I need to quit applications or delete files. This happens even when only 1 app is running. I'm using mail or firefox, nothing too complicated. There is 4G left on my hard drive. What do I do? I just upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5. I thought that might help, but it hasn't. If anything, it is a bit worse.

There is 4G left on my hard drive.
Free up drive space ASAP before it gets to the point where your Mac wont boot.
Freeing Up Hard Disk Space - Mac Guides

Keep getting startup disk full messages but I have plenty of HD space

Hi all,
I've been experiencing a odd problem on my 18 month old 13" MacBook Pro. As of last week, I keep getting the dreaded "Your startup disk is almost full" and "Your startup disk is full" messages, yet I have over 7GB of hard drive space available (in addition to 8GB of installed ram) seemingly at random times. I noticed this message come up immediately after a restart this morning, as well as when I woke from display sleep earlier today, but most of the day the messages pop up (sometimes it's "almost full", sometimes it's "full") every 30-60 mins or so. I then immediately check my available space and it reads a solid 7GBs.
Any idea what's going on, or how I can fix this? I'd like to fully understand why this is happening so I can prevent it from coming up in the future.
Thanks!
Addendum: Ok, did a few restarts and it's confirmed: I get the "Your startup disk is full" message when my login screen appers, every time. Help!

Mike Amin wrote:
1. Since when have Mac users needed to adhere to the "10% rule"?
Since hard disk's where built into computers regardless of Mac or others.
10% is just a arbitrary value in a configuration file: Warn at x% - for at least three reasons:
If a disk run full the system is not longer able to extend logfiles, configuration files, the Mac's equivalent for /proc or the swap space.
This will cause the system to freeze and/or prevent the next boot.
On shutdown the system could not write out the data buffered in memory to the disk.
Thereby data may be lost or the filesystem corrupted as a result.
Imagine your 7GB free and the system tríes on shutdown to write back 9GB RAM buffer ...**Do'h**
For user safety. Imagine you have only 5GB free and you load a 7.5GB RAW image file into a application. **Do'h**
Mike Amin wrote:
4. Lupunus, you mention that "available space" is different than "true space". Can you elaborate?
The displayed "Available Space" did not include the cached/buffered files, as to display that value the "sync" command get not invoked.
The kernel keeps data in memory to avoid doing (relatively slow) diskreads and writes.
sync writes any data buffered in memory out to disk.
Lupunus

Start up disk full message but has 40GB available

I'm getting the Startup disk full message so I checked the HD, it's 80GB, when I click 'Get Info' the available disk space changes frequently from 45GB available to 0 available. I deleted the trash and I know the disk is not full and has around 40GB available. I'm not sure why the HD available space changes often. Any idea??
Thanks.

Assuming you have no CD in the drive, this does not sound good. Before doing anything further, I would highly recommend to remove the hard drive, set it in an external housing and see whether you can rescue your data when connecting theis HD to a different MAC.
Did you have FileFault turned on?

Startup disk full error - boots normally but won't start finder

I'm having a problem in which my iMac when it boots gives me an error that the startup disk is full, but other than that it can boot normally and allow me to log in, but after that the startup stalls. I never get past the default "outer space" desktop image and finder never starts, so there's no icons, no dock, and nothing on the menu bar. What's weird is that Safari and Mail start and I can see them because I believe I have them starting automatically at boot. Safari works (I'm using it now to enter this discussion). Mail on the other hand starts but is hung checking for the servers for incoming mail.
I've tried to boot in safe mode (holding down Shift key at startup), but it doesn't work.
I've tried to boot in single user mode (holding down cmd-S at startup), but it doesn't work either.
I've tried to boot from Snow Leopard installation media (holding down C at startup), but it doesn't work as well.
Each time I try one of these alternate boot methods, it just takes me to the normal login screen with the startup disk full message. I click OK, login, and get stuck.
I'm just trying to get the finder started so that I can delete some files, but I just can't get that far. It's strange that the browser works perfectly and internet connection is fine, but nothing else works.
Thoughts? Thanks. - Mike

Hi Lina, and welcome to Apple Discussions.
Safe Mode might allow you to boot and free up some space.
If you have access to another Mac and a FireWire cable, another option would be to use FireWire Target Disk Mode to transfer data to the other Mac and delete it on your MBA.
If either way works, you want to open up somewhere around 15% free space. Once you do that, run Repair Disk: Boot from install disc (insert disc>restart>immediately hold down c key and keep holding it until you see “Preparing Installation”)>at first screen select the language and click Continue> click on the Utilities Menu in the menu bar>open Disk Utility>select your HD in the panel on the left side>click Repair Disk at bottom of main window. Run this at least twice, and keep running it until it says “appears ok” twice in a row. If that doesn’t happen, you may need a stronger utility such as DiskWarrior or if the directory is damaged beyond repair, you may need to reinstall the OS, or you may have a damaged HD (repair utilities can only repair the directory structure, not the HD itself).
Ultimately, though, it sounds like you need a larger HD . . . .

Macbook air startup disk full, after removed 149GB pic folder

After I removed ALL pictures worth of 149GB, I still get the "startup disk full" message. It pops out all the time, more than frustrating, my air is not just a typewriter.

After trashing the pictures did you empty the trash? Look under the Finder menu.

This is baffling me...Startup Disk Full issue

Dear Members,
Yesterday I posted on this forum for some help with resolving a Startup Disk Full message that was appearing when I was using Adobe PhotoShop CS. This only started to happen recently ( 2 days ago). When I try and crop a TIFF or RAW file I get the Scratch Disk Full and the Startup Disk Full errors.
So I followed your advise and made backups, rebooted from an external CD (Tiger osx) and did the repair thing. There was minor header damage at the time. But this was fixed. I did a small test with Photoshop and all appeared OK, that is until this morning. I tried to edit/crop a TIFF file and I got the same messages again.
I have approx 152GB of total disk space now and after deleted/re moving to external media, I have approx 82GB of available space. I also have 2 GB of RAM. Yes I removed the files prior to doing the Disk Utility repair. And yes I did run Repair Permissions too. I have been using this setup for over a year with no issues, and YES the TIFF and RAW files have always been huge (approx 35MB).
What is baffling me now is why do I still get this error message. I took the liberty to re-run Disk Utility from external bootable CD and the Verify showed everything to be fine. So my questions are:
1. why am I still getting this error?
2. Am I at risk of damaging my system in any way?
3. How can I fix this issue?
Any help/pointers appreciated.
Max

OK Guys I think I have solved my problem.
In my desperation to find meaning to why this was happening I stumbled across another forum where a user had a slightly related issue -> http://kubotaworkshops.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1028&sid=5e2982e3da6027f683997 ffbcf088d59
In there he had mentioned a root cause of a related issue. Immediately I checked to see what the settings for the Crop tool were set to, and to my surprise they were at 300inches x 400 inches at 300 dpi. According to his calculations this put the Scratch Disk size at pretty large.
Anyway I am not quite sure on his mathematics and how he arrived at the 60.3GB file size, but I am guessing that my files were large to start with and somehow the scratch disk size needed was even larger, hence the reason for the error. Would appreciate if someone can explain how the 60.3GB was derived from a 100K file, 400x600inc @ 300dpi as in the link above
Hopefully this was the fix. I have tried it out and I am able to crop. But then again thats what I said yesterday
Max

Adobe Photoshop Scratch Disk Full/Startup Disk Full error - PLEASE HELP

Dear ALL,
I have started to notice recently that when I run Photoshop CS on my Mac OSX Tiger, I am getting the Startup Disk Full error message. Never happended before.
Since my initial post I downloaded Macaroni (utility) and have run the daily/weekly/monthly backups, checked the /private/var/vm and /private/var/log and /Volumes. Nothing unusual there...
When I started getting this error I had 32GB left on a looked at my HD and I seem to have 32GB available on a 152GB drive. Now after deleting I have 76GB capacity left.
But when I tried to open a Photoshop PSD or TIFF file and do a crop I still get tge Startup Disk is Full error followed by the Adobe Photoshop error Scratch Disk is Full.
I am thinking of running the Disk Utility from the Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and doing a Verify Disk and Verify Disk Permissions followed by Repair Disk Permissions. I will be logged into the machine whilst doing this. Is there any danger in this as I have read elsewhere that I need to do this from a bootable volume. If that is the case how do I create a bootable disk/cd? If not then what is the cure to my Disk Full as surely there is now nearly 50% FREE!!!!!
Please help.
Max

PS will always use the boot disk for scratch to some extent even with an alternate primary scratch disk.
Be sure to turn off Spotlight as it causes problems.
4GB of RAM would be nice, I understand small files don't work well if there is more than 4GB RAM but large files will. OS X uses free RAM as cache and RAM disk before using disk drives.
How much RAM is allocated to PS? More RAM would help.
A dedicated lean boot drive helps. Install just what is needed for your work, use a separate drive for data, and yet another RAID volume for scratch.
When in doubt, backup with SuperDuper, and do an erase and then restore. Always backup before repairing; and never, ever, use an old version of Tiger CD/DVD - like 10.4.2 on 10.4.7/.8. Use "fsck" instead, or your emergency boot drive.
Also, give Applejack a shot and delete the cache folders and swap files from time to time to keep a system humming. CS/CS2 and Tiger benefit nicely from more RAM.

Startup Disk Full Error - Please help

Dear ALL,
I have started to notice recently that when I run Photoshop CS on my Mac OSX Tiger, I am getting the Startup Disk Full error message.
I have no clue as to how to correctly fix this issue. I looked at my HD and I seem to have 32GB available, which I would have thought would have been ample space. I have started to remove unwanted files and backup to CD large image files. So this should free up some more space. The question is will this be enough to get rid of this issue and is it associated with the amount of HD space on my drive? or would I need to run some script etc? or download/buy some other product to fix this?
Your help is greatly appreciated.
Max

OK I tried Macaroni...and when I tried to work with a TIFF file I get the same Startup Disk is FULL message. The I get an adobe message saying Scratch Disk is FULL.
Any further suggestions would be appreciated.

What do you do when message is "startup Disk Full"?

what do you do when message is "startup Disk Full"?

You must Move or trash some really big GB+ sized files right away, before OSX destroys itself.
Empty the Trash if you haven't lately.
How much free space is on the HD, where has all the space gone?
OmniDiskSweeper is likely the easiest/best, and is now free...
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download/
And if needed, you can use Terminal to run it in admin mode to see files/folders your user can't see...
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how_to_recover_missing_hard_drive_space/

"startup disk full" message-recommend 'cleaning' software please?

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