Too little free disk space (FileVault problem)

I've recently been downloading and/or deleting fairly large files, and FileVault hasn't been offering to clean up my home directory on reboot. This means my computer has 276.9 MB of free disk space - not an ideal situation. I'd very much like to just turn off filevault at this point - I'm nothing but unhappy with its performance - but, of course, I don't have the free disk space to do so.
Is there any way to force filevault to allow me to recover disk space?

Do you have any files you and delete (trash) manually to make room, such as old iPod Software and iSight Updaters?
Or, at least backup some files to a CD and DVD that you don't use that often?
Do you have "Software Update" set to "Install and Keep Packages"?
You can safely remove these (backup) these packages as well to make room.
Do a search on your hard drive for any ".dmg" or ".pkg" files and see what turns up.

Similar Messages

Why do I have so little free disk space and am running slowly?

My iMac is running very slowly, and I was advised to examine the activity monitor to troubleshoot. I am not technically savvy, but I can see that I have very little free disk space, and that Safari seems to be taking up a lot of memory. I'm not a haevy user, so I'm unclear what the problem is. Could someone explain in simple terms what's wrong and how I can fix it? Thanks

Jerry Kaiser wrote:
My problem seems to be greatest when I have both Safari and Firefox running.
There is a known memory issue with Firefox on OS X (Chrome has it too) first be sure your updated and check your plug-in compatability (both should be done auto-magically when restarting FF)
https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features/
Next time when you have a slowdown occuring, simply close all the open Firefox windows and that should clear the issue up.
What occurs is when one browses for sometime opening tabs, it asks OS X for more memory and then has trouble using what's been freed up by closed tabs. The issue has been occuring less often as updates have been rolling out.
If one has one more more other large programs open this also contributes to the issue.

Turning on FileVault requires an additional 4092.0 GB of free disk space to

I get this Message when turning on file vault:
Turning on FileVault requires an additional 4092.0 GB of free disk space to create an encrypted copy of the home folder. Try emptying the Trash or deleting files you don't need.
This surprising as the Disk is 60GB or which only 40GB is used. What is causing file vault to think that it needs all this space?

File-Vault works by creating an Encrypted Disk Image that is the same exact size as your Home Folder. Once created, all your files are moved into this encrypted disc image and then deleted from their original locations.
So, to answer your question, File-Vault has to have enough free space to create a disk image that is just as big as your home folder is before it can do anything else.
The amount of free space needed for File-Vault to do its thang is exactly the same size as your home folder. To get this size, Highlight your home folder and press Apple-i. This Get Info windows will Calculate the size.
Good Luck,
Steve the Mac Guy

Problem with free disk space

Hi. I have a problem on the 256Gb SSD of my MBP retina.
Before deleting a 40Gb video folder i had 80gb free disk space.
After the delete if i check the disk info from the icon on the desktop i have 120gb but checking in the disk utility say i stll have 80gb free. Why?
Thanks in advance

TM will do that on any laptop if it is not tethered to a Time Machine drive. It then deletes the files (local snapshots) later - see some info here:
http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

Free disk space decreasing

since installing lion i have noticed a lost of free disk space on the build in harddrive even if i save as little as possible on it. i havea 1TB external hd....any ideas why??

You can also make use of inotify to see disk activities. Install inotify-tools, then run:
inotifywait -m -e modify -e create ~/
Monitor for a while, while the free disk space is descreasing.
If that didn't find anything, add --recursive to the command but it can take a while to set up. See the inotifywait(1) man page for details.
My guess is some log files too, e.g. ~/.xsession-errors.
Last edited by lolilolicon (2011-09-21 16:31:00)

Variable free disk space

Suddenly, the amount of free disk space is jumping between 26 gB and 0 gB. This happens periodically, with almost no programs running. I am getting the error message "Your hard disk is almost full" when this happens. iDisk sync is off. I tried repairing permission and DiskWarrior. I have had no problems since installing Mac OS 10.5..
Everything has been fine until today. I installed Airport Utility 5.3.1 update ?yesterday, but that is not likely the issue. Running Activity Monitor did not give me the answer.

Firstly, I confirm that in LV 8.6, we don't have this problem.
Secondly, let me explain what defragment is doing. For example, if you write data to a file for multiple times, you'll probably get TDMS file with multiple segments and headers, so that the .tdms_index file will quite large. What defragment does is to re-organize your data in the tdms file and you'll get only one segment/header and a tiny .tdms_index file.
So, after you writing the file and you can make up a VI, read the channels in the file and write the data into a new TDMS file, only one time's writing will not result in multiple segments, so the new written tdms file is well organized. If you can't write all channels altogether once to a TDMS file, you can write one channel by one channel, if there are not too many channels. Does this make sense?
I recommend you to do so if you want to write a 2.0 TDMS file and benefit from TDMS high speed streaming in LabVIEW 2009 and it's a workaround not to use defragment but also get a "defragemented" file. I'm afraid the fix would not go with 2009 SP1.

Unable to free disk space on macbook pro.

I have this weird problem. I have deleted some big files (In GB) to free up HD space, but my Mac HD free disk space stays the same, it is not increasing as it should. I had like 3.7 GB free space. I deleted 4GB files and it still shows 3.7GB free space. I deleted everything from 'Trash' and even tried restarting the computer. What seems to be the problem?

Here is some info on that (I've never had that problem myself, so I'm not sure what to suggest):
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1121144
Not sure if this would still apply:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sparsebundledefined.html
http://pondini.org/TM/C12.html
It seems to have something to do with a backup and/or FileVault. Also, do you have any third party apps for backing up, cleaning your Mac, AV protection or anything like that installed?

Update download trouble: App Store says, in error, "-not enough free disk space"

I wonder if anyone can help me troubleshoot this... I am unable to download some updates as from the App Store, and instead get an error message that suggests I don't have enough free disk space despite there being over 100GB free.
More detail: after installing Mavericks successfully, I started updating a few applications. While downloading iMovie and iPhoto there was an error - can't recall what the pop-up said, but I think it was a fairly general kind of error message. When I then tried to download them again, the App Store gave me an error message about free disk space, so I deleted a bunch of files and tried again. Same result, same error message ("Your hard disk does not have enough free space"). I checked on free space, however, and at this point I had over 100GB of free space.
I tried deleting the com.apple.storeagent folder in my Library/Caches folder, then trying again. but it made no difference. I've restarted, repaired permissions, verified the disk, restarted again, and I'm still seeing the error.
One odd feature of this problem: in the App Store purchases tab (see screengrab below), the icons for both iMovie and iPhoto are missing/broken, which might just point the way to what is going wrong.
System details:
IMac 27", 2009
2.8GHz i7
12GB RAM
Running OS X 10.9
Couple of screengrabs to illustrate:

From the menu bar, select
 ▹ System Preferences ▹ Time Machine
If the padlock icon is closed, click it to unlock the settings and authenticate. Turn Time Machine OFF, then turn it backON and close the preference pane. Wait a few minutes, then try the operation again.

Mysterious lack of free disk space

Recently im having a problem with my free disk space disappearing in osx.
running a du command shows a 90GB file usage in my /Library directory, but i cant seem to find or access it anywhere
i enabled hidden files
also ran
sudo tmutil disablelocal
my free space disappears. nothing shows up in finder or other file manager programs.
server:Library peffy03$ sudo du -h -d1
Password:
2.6G          ./Application Support
361M          ./Audio
34M          ./Automator
12M          ./Caches
0B          ./ColorPickers
100K          ./ColorSync
0B          ./Components
0B          ./Compositions
0B          ./Contextual Menu Items
1.1M          ./CoreMediaIO
99M          ./Desktop Pictures
415M          ./Dictionaries
0B          ./DirectoryServices
30M          ./Documentation
0B          ./Extensions
0B          ./Filesystems
1007M          ./Fonts
3.7M          ./Fonts Disabled
65M          ./Frameworks
0B          ./Graphics
18M          ./Image Capture
0B          ./Input Methods
254M          ./Internet Plug-Ins
28K          ./iTunes
0B          ./Java
0B          ./Keyboard Layouts
164K          ./Keychains
20K          ./LaunchAgents
28K          ./LaunchDaemons
188M          ./Logs
5.2M          ./Messages
56K          ./Modem Scripts
0B          ./OpenDirectory
8.0K          ./PDF Services
564K          ./Perl
17M          ./PreferencePanes
384K          ./Preferences
647M          ./Printers
176K          ./PrivilegedHelperTools
0B          ./Python
18M          ./QuickLook
5.2M          ./QuickTime
84K          ./Receipts
0B          ./Ruby
0B          ./Sandbox
140M          ./Screen Savers
0B          ./ScriptingAdditions
1.1M          ./Scripts
4.0K          ./Security
84G          ./Server
0B          ./Speech
0B          ./Spelling
4.1M          ./Spotlight
0B          ./StartupItems
0B          ./SystemProfiler
76K          ./Updates
21M          ./User Pictures
0B          ./Video
4.3M          ./WebServer
45M          ./Widgets
90G          .

30 seconds later
97228896          .
91052984          ./Server
57021568          ./Server/PostgreSQL For Server Services
38736148          ./Server/PostgreSQL For Server Services/Backup
33686588          ./Server/ProfileManager
33686580          ./Server/ProfileManager/Data
29436852          ./Server/ProfileManager/Data/backup
18285404          ./Server/PostgreSQL For Server Services/Data
18235408          ./Server/PostgreSQL For Server Services/Data/pg_xlog
4249724          ./Server/ProfileManager/Data/PostgreSQL
4210716          ./Server/ProfileManager/Data/PostgreSQL/pg_xlog
2696628          ./Application Support
1441632          ./Application Support/GarageBand
1031416          ./Fonts
662968          ./Printers

Please for referral information, how can I get more disk space, or actually information and guidelines that can have enough free disk space. How, I have to delete documents or downloading to another drive.

Please for referral information, how can I get more disk space, or actually information and guidelines that can have enough free disk space. How, I have to delete documents or downloading to another drive. (The problem is that Safari could not download the file "iTunesSetup.exe" because there is not enough free disk space.Try deleting documents or downloading to another drive) ... Perhaps this is the main problem why can not open iTunes and inscription is: the folder "iTunes" can not be found or created, and is required. The default location for this folder is inside the "Music" folder. - And after options ok, appears option: Choose iTunes Library with inscription iTunes needs a library to continue. You may choose an existing iTunes library or create a new one - but still following options Choose Library and the following options can not open iTunes ... Please for instructions on how to eliminate the problem or eror ...
Mac is running OS X v10.6.8, Safari should be 5.1.10. Or Mac OS X / Version 10.6.8 / Build 10K549 / Serial Number W8****ATM / Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo / Memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 or More Info:
Hardware Overview:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro7,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2,4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1,07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP71.0039.B0B
SMC Version (system): 1.62f7
Serial Number (system): W80394HFATM
Hardware UUID: 94647506-C5D0-5D73-BC7F-FC680D238F43
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled
<Personsl Information Edited by Host>

buy an external HD 1TB for $60
NO notebook is a mass storage device, so dont try to turn it into one, it doesnt work that way.
Unless youre using it every couple weeks, its static data and should be on an external HD
In the case of a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro Retina with ‘limited’ storage on the SSD, this distinction becomes more important in that in an ever rapidly increasing file-size world, you keep vital large media files, pics, video, PDF collections, music off your SSD and archived on external storage, for sake of the necessary room for your system to have free space to operate, store future applications and general workspace. You should never be put in the position of considering “deleting things” on your macbook SSD in order to ‘make space’.
Professionals who create and import very large amounts of data have almost no change in the available space on their computers internal HD because they are constantly archiving data to arrays of external or networked HD.
Or in the case of the consumer this means you keep folders for large imported or created data and you ritually offload and archive this data for safekeeping, not only to safeguard the data in case your macbook has a HD crash, or gets stolen, but importantly in keeping the ‘breathing room’ open for your computer to operate, expand, create files, add applications, for your APPS to create temp files, and for general operation.

I'm losing 2GB of free disk space every day. How can I prevent this?

Every day this week I notice that I lose about 2GB of free disk space on my MacBook Pro. I'm now down to 20GB. When I started the week, I had over 30GB. I haven't installed any new programs of signficance. I store my large documents (photos, music, movies) on an external hard disk. While the MBP is not giving me problems, performance-wise, I'm concerned about the constant loss of free space.
I checked the size of my sleepimage and swapfile in /private/var/vm and they appear to be normal. The sleepimage size remains constant at 4.29GB and there is only one swapfile that is using 67.1 megs.
I don't seem retain disk space even after clearing the User and System caches, repairing permissions, and restarting my computer.
I checked my recent Console messages and here is a short snippet:
5/13/10 9:49:04 AM com.apple.launchd.peruser.514[285] (com.shirtpocket.backuponmount) Throttling respawn: Will start in 9 seconds
5/13/10 9:49:13 AM osascript[3781] Error loading /Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types: dlopen(/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types, 262): no suitable image found. Did find:
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types: no matching architecture in universal wrapper
5/13/10 9:49:13 AM com.shirtpocket.backuponmount[3781] osascript: OpenScripting.framework - scripting addition "/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax" declares no loadable handlers.
5/13/10 10:31:20 AM PreferenceSyncClient[4405] Preference plist was NOT a dictionary.
I reviewed my Login Items and there doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary there that could be chewing up disk space.
GrowlHelperApp
AdobeResourceSynchronizer
textexpanderd
iTunesHelper
Rogue Amoeba Schedule Helper
VMware Fusion Helper
Dropbox
Lastly, I did a search in Finder using the following criteria and came up empty:
Kind is Any
File visibility = Visible or Invisible
Last modified date is within last 5 days
Size is greater than 10 MB

Yes, I'm running TechTool Pro 5 and it definitely looks like the Data Recovery feature is causing the disk space to be lost. I see lots of recent dates under the Directory Backups list. Looking at the Help guide, I haven't yet found how to turn this feature off.

Free Disk space - burning dvd

Help! I have sucessfully created my iDVD project and want to burn to a DVD disk. When I click the "burn" button I get the following error, "Not enough free disk space for encoding the remaining assets - Multiplexer Preparation Error."
What am I doing wrong?
Thank you.

Hi Wendi:
That is usually an idvd4 problem...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93553
Sue

Safari could not download the file -there is not enough free disk space

I've tried downloading Windows Media Viewer, StuffIt Expander, and Adobe Reader however when I do I receive an error message as follows (example is for the StuffIt Expander -similar message for the other programs): Safari could not download the file "nstuffitexp12.01.dmg" because there is not enough free disk space.
There is PLENTY of free disk space on my hard drive. The hard drive has 20 GB of Used space and 129 GB of Available space.
A few simple fixes I've tried, that did not help: I cleared my Cache, I emptied my Trash, I restarted the computer. (sorry, I'm a Mac novice -not sure what else to try)
What's wrong? How do I download these files??
I would like to open Window Media Viewer files (.wmv) and Adobe Reader files (.pdf) so I need these programs on my computer.
So as a secondary question, is there a program for Macs better suited to open and view .wmv and .pdf files?
Please help with my download / free disk space problem, this is driving me crazy (for hours now). Thank you in advance for your assistance!!

Mac OS X can open pdf files fine without Adobe's bloatware, they open by default in TextEdit - the whole of OS X's display system is actually based around pdf technology so it's easy for the system to integrate pdf tools. There are alternative tools available on MacUpdate but for reading TextEdit is fine.
wmv files should be opened with the Flip4Mac Quicktime plugin, Microsoft no longer support their own player on Mac and even supply the F4M plugin from their own download pages.
For Stuffit files (which are thankfully much rarer these days) I'd use The Unarchiver instead of Allume's fat cat.
To fix the other problem you could try changing your download location in Safari preferences, General - it may be that the location you are downloading to has the problem. You can pick anywhere you like just to test it out.

Free disk space recommendation

Hi,
I have a question about free disk space recommendation. My system now has <25% free space at ASP3, I can't see any problems until now, but I think that I can some troubles in the future depending on DB growth, it isn't?
Have you any tip about this? Are there any recommendation in IBM i5 redbooks?
Thank you!
Best Regards,
André Honma

Generally you do not want to go much higher than 70 to 80% utilization.
This is because the system may need the free space for system operations, temporary storage and to allow for spikes in storage that may occur when processing heavy workloads, such as temporary work space or for transient files, journal receivers, system logs and spool entries (QSPL as opposed to SAP's own spooling).
Certain systems functions, such as dedicated physical file reorganizations, have specific minimum requirements with respect to the need for free space.
At this point, you are at 75% utilization which puts you right in the middle of the range where you really want to examine what is going on.
Usually when you hit 90% or above you will start to get messages from the OS about high storage.
You can free up space in several ways.   Only keep journal receivers for as long as you need them.   Once they are detached and saved offline (tape/remote jounals etc) they can be deleted.   You need to have a strategy in place for this, however.   Our shop archives a full save on a weekly basis, and all journal receivers up to that point (with a small margin retained for visibility) are deleted.
In addition, we use Datamirror's High Availability product which scrapes the journal receivers to mirror the production system on a hot backup.   The receivers must remain on the system until they are replicated (this is also true for other High Availability products).   This is usually near real-time, but it can be an issue if you do not manage it properly. (Given our weekly archive strategy, this is not an overriding consideration for us, but it may be important for those with a different strategy.)
SAP uses the reuse deleted records feature of DB2, but sometimes excessive amounts of deleted records build up due to spikes, especially in files like VBDATA and related files, or after purging older transaction history or deleting old clients.   You can periodically reorganize physical files to reclaim deleted space.
You can also use RCLSTG (Reclaim storage) and RCLSPLSTG (Reclaim Spool Storage) to reclaim some temporary space.
However, RCLSTG should only be used if there is a specific need for it, as outlined in IBM's technical note: <a href="http://www-912.ibm.com/s_dir/slkbase.NSF/0/9373303619fb4b89862565c2007d4bcf?OpenDocument&ExpandSection=1">Overview of the RCLSTG Command</a>
Periodic IPLs will also reclaim space, including spool space as if RCLSPLSTG had been run..
If you have other libraries on your system, you can also see if they are being managed wisely using the same ideas as you would use for your SAP libraries.
Within SAP itself there are tools to manage tables that are within the scope of you various SIDs and clients.    When SAP purges data, however, it only does a soft delete via DB2 SQL, and a physical file reorg as noted above may be required to reclaim space at the OS level.
As the previous respondent noted, you should keep track of the growth of your system and then take whatever steps are necessary to bring storage down or increase storage.
You may also want to consider your storage strategy.   We had been using full mirroring, and we were able to increase our effective storage by going to RAID-5, and therefore put off the need to buy more disk for a time.
Good luck.
Brian
Message was edited by:
        Brian Sammond

"Not Enough Free Disk Space" error message, but Finder shows plenty of disk space available

Apologies if this is a double post, but I have been searching all over and can't seem to find this issue in the forums.
I have a 256GB Macbook with a fresh copy of Lion installed, am going through the process of migrating files back over, after which I have approximately 125GB free. However, whenever I go online and try to download any type of file (PDF, sofware install files, etc.), an error message displays saying:
Safari could not download the file “blahblahblah.dmg” because there is not enough free disk space.
Not sure how this is possible since the .dmg file is 18MB and Finder is saying there is over 125GB free. I've tried repairing disk permissions, booting off the Lion recovery disk and repairing the startup disk, all to no avail. Anyone had this issue before?

Don Archibald wrote:
Check in Safari's Preferences (in the Safari menu) to see what has been designated as the destination for downloads. If that has somehow been set to a disk image or a CD/DVD location, you'll get that 'not enough space' message.
The same may occur if the download target location is set to a non-available drive. This can happen when aliases are used and things have been copied (migrated) from another drive.
Thanks for the suggestion. That wasn't the problem, but your suggestion did shed light on something else. I was able to perform a right-click action and Save File As... to my Documents folder. On further analysis, it appears that the "Macintosh HD", Downloads folder, and Desktop are showing the "pencil with a line through it" icon in the bottom left of the Finder window, which would suggest those areas are read-only for some reason.
My user account is the only one on the machine and it's an admin account. Any guesses as to why that might have set itself that way, or any suggestions on how to change it? I've already tried repairing permissions on the startup disk in Disk Utility.

Too little free disk space (FileVault problem)

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