What does erase free space do?

Can somebody explain how can I recover the speace I "freed" in order to stop my Mac to keep recovering delted files? I am just afraid that I used up all my free space and now I wont be able to save anything else anymore. HELP!!!

karena60 wrote:
Can somebody explain how can I recover the speace I "freed"
If you reboot your Mac, it will learn the new drive space and that space is now free.
Check it under Activity Monitor > Disk Usage
in order to stop my Mac to keep recovering delted files?
Your Mac shouldn't be recovering deleted files on it's own, unless you installed some sort of software.
Once you Empty or Secure Empty Trash, those files in the Trash can are pretty much gone permanently.
I am just afraid that I used up all my free space and now I wont be able to save anything else anymore.
That is true, why you open Activity Monitor in your Utilities folder and click on Drive Usage.
You need to stay under 80% of the drive filled.
If you need more "space" you need to learn about storage drives to store your data pernamently, TimeMachine or clone backups don't perform pernament storage, they are backup systems of the boot drive.
Most commonly used backup methods

Similar Messages

Does Erase Free Space Degrade Hard Drive?

I've noticed with my macbook that erasing free space takes bloody ages, 2 hours for 1 pass, 18 for 7 pass, 3 days for 35 pass.
This seems like an awful long time to have your laptop sitting on and open let alone your disc spinning and writing. Does this process degrade, slow down or have any seriously harmful side-effects to your hard drive?

My question is simply, 3 days of nonstop writing to zero out free space from insecure trash empties (some people might have important goverment docs, I don't know) seems like long enough to burn out your drive in one single process, no?
No, not unless the drive is already perilously close to failure when you begin the process.
And with their awkward sleep with lid closed standard feature, you have to leave the laptop sitting open and running... 3 days, surely that'll cause some problems?
Are you concerned that running the computer with its display open is hazardous to its health? Nothing could be farther from the truth. It cools itself more efficiently with the display open than with the display closed. Apart from that, having the lid open or closed makes no difference at all.
Out of curiosity, what do you consider "awkward" about having the computer go to sleep when you close the display?
I agree with Michael that if one were to do a 35-pass erase of free space every week, or even every month, it would become a significant factor in the longevity of the drive. But doing it a small handful of times over the life of the drive — say perhaps once a year — would account for only an insignificant portion of the drive's total use/operation.

In restoring my mac mini to factory specs-what is considered "free space" as in the question of erasing free space.

When you go to do a factory restore what is erasing "free space?
Plus, I have no Command keys on my keyboard-how to do Command R without a Command Key?
Carol

CarolF5 wrote:
When you go to do a factory restore what is erasing "free space?
Don't bother with that option, unless you are going to sell your computer and want to be sure that your data can't be recovered.
To be more specific it securely erases the unoccupied space of your hard drive, leaving the rest of your data intact.
I have no Command keys on my keyboard-how to do Command R without a Command Key?
You mean you have a PC keyboard? If that is the case the Command key translates to the key with the Windows flag.
The Alt key is the Option key on an Apple keyboard.

Disk Utility - Erase Free Space-what does it really do?

Hey Forum,
I am using mac os 10.6.4 on my macbook and i have a doubting question for quite sometimes, what does disk utility erase free space feature really do? Does it gives you more free space? or what? I know it prevents the recovery of deleted files but i want to know what more it does and do not do? Like, now my hdd free space kept increasing and decreasing, by a few 100 mbs or 50mbs etc, so do i erase free space so to solve this problem? Ok, i do not only want to know does it solve the previous problem, but also the questions stated in the whole long paragraph i have wrote. If you know anything related to disk utility's erase free space, feel free to tell me!
Pls help me, I need you guys' help!
Thank you.
Regards
Ala.

Erase free space simply writes zeros over the space occupied by deleted files to prevent data recovery. That's all it does. It does not give you extra disk space.
Your disk space goes up and down a bit because the system creates temporary files and logs which take up space, such as the Safari cache. You can clear these file using a utility like Onyx (which is free)

SLOW MAC: Why does my mac run faster during the "erase free space" operation?

Hi community!
So I've been using my Macbook Pro Late 2012 edition for just over a year and a half now, and to no surprise, I find the spinning beachball whirling away more often than I'd care to see it. So I start a full mac clean-up including deleting login items, using Appzapper to clear up my apps, using Onyx to clear up some cache elements, deleting unused files and freeing up hard drive space.
I've successfully cleared over 60% of disk space, (200GB used, 300GB free), but I find a recurring problem persisting, despite my best efforts to get rid of it. You see, every few seconds, the spinning beach ball appears and freezes up my entire desktop no matter what I'm doing. Trying even the simplest things, like opening the apps in the dock or right clicking a file takes ages, movies freeze up all the time, regardless of what app plays them, finder is slow and it has nothing to do with my ram usage (I use the app FreeMemory to check in real-time how much I'm using) or my CPU usage (Activity monitor open at all times). It has to be the drive.
So then I tried running ClamXav, and found a windows trojan, which I deleted manually, but no change.
Now, during all these stages I was regularly running erase free space opeartions (Fast x1), and noticed something curious: during the operation, my problem disappears. I still get occasional loading beach balls, and ocassional jumps in movies, but other than that, I can use my mac normally again.
So now, I'm constantly running erase free space operations and it's painfully annoying to say the least.
I've tried defragging, to no avail.
I had the problem on Mountain Lion, and upgraded to Mavericks thinking that could change it (by the way it took 18 hours to install mavericks, don't know if that's related).
In other words, I need your help. Does anybody know if I've no choice but to buy an external hardrive, backup my data, and erase my entire homedrive? Can this situation still be salvaged?
Thanks!

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Any clues?

Does OS X 10.2 has the secure delete option & erase free space

Hi All, I have an old iBook G4 1.42ghz with 1GB ram and I am thinking of putting an old disk of 10.2 onto it as I always liked OS X 10.2.
I just can't remember of this verion of OS X has the secure delete option in finder when emptying trash and also does it have the abilty to erase free space with zeros etc..

What OS 10.2 disc are you planning to use to install 10.2. If it's from another model Mac, it won't work.
 Cheers, Tom

'erase free space' not secure - it doesn't seem to work?

Just wanted to point out that the erase free space option in Mountain Lion does not seem to work, at all.
A week ago I ran erase free space on my primary data drive then later, out of curiosity, I ran an inexpensive third party recovery program on the disk just to see what happened. Interestingly enough the recovery software was able to find and restore files that I had deleted over a year ago.
This has me thinking, so today I tried it again, only with a 7 pass erase this time. Nope, same thing. After a 7 pass erase (erase free space) this low end, less than $35 recovery software turns up tons of files, everything from stuff I just deleted a few days ago to stuff from over a year ago.
If I'm doing something wrong I would love for someone to point it out to me. Not that I'm toting state secrets or anything on my mac, but still - my privacy is important to me and I assume it is to others.
I'd encourage folks to try this out for themselves.
My set up is a 2011 macbook pro with an SSD as the boot drive, I've got a second harddrive installed in the optical bay and this is where my home folder lives. The secondary drive is the drive where I'm running erase free space.
The only thing that I can think of is that, even though the button is not greyed out, maybe I need to be booted to recovery in order to succesfully run erase free space on system drives?
Any input would be greatly appreciated, otherwise this seems like a pretty ugly security lapse on the part of Apple. Imagine if you're selling your machine and secure erasing before turnign it over to its new owner - and the new owner can run a $35 dollar recovery program and access everything on your machine.
Not good.

Thanks for your response, William.
I think that the issue may have to do with being booted to the system while trying to erase free space. I ran a 7 pass erase free space on a 1TB external Lacie drive this afternoon, the operation took a bit over 6 hours to complete and recovery sofatware is turning up nothing.
This is in contrast to the main drive, which my original post referenced, which is a 500gb 7200 rpm internal drive. A 7 pass secure erase took less than 5 minutes to complete - so, even though the drive is 1/2 the size, there's obviously something not right with the 7 minutes time to complete.
Tomorrow I'm going to try either booting to another account (which doesn't utilize this partcular disk) or booting to recovery and seeing what happens.
I have a feeling that this will solve the problem - I'll post back tomorrow evening.

Disk utility taking forever to "Erase Free Space"!

i am trying to speed up my macbook so i read on http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-speed-up-your-mac-without-spending-any-cash/ that one way to speed up a mac is to "Erase Free Space" and when i did it, it was working fine but now its been "Creating Temperary File" for like 10 minutes and all of my HD is filled up now when i had like 50 GB open before i did this! i cant take a screen shot because when i do, it says it cant save it because there isn't and space open on my HD! help!!!!

guitar4542 wrote:
i am trying to speed up my macbook so i read on http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-speed-up-your-mac-without-spending-any-cash/ that one way to speed up a mac is to "Erase Free Space"
that advice is nonsense. there is absolutely no difference in speed when writing to a space written over by zeros as erase free space does.
and when i did it, it was working fine but now its been "Creating Temperary File" for like 10 minutes and all of my HD is filled up now when i had like 50 GB open before i did this! i cant take a screen shot because when i do, it says it cant save it because there isn't and space open on my HD! help!!!!
what you see is normal. erasing free space takes all of the free space on the drive, temporarily puts it into one huge file and writes it over with zeros. that file is then deleted. while the process takes place (and it can take a very long time). you can't use the computer because you have no free space on the hard drive.

Disk Utility - Erase Free Space - Creating Temporary File Freezes

BDAqua: I tried responding to your reply to my original posting but I get an error message that I was not authorized to reply. I logged out. I can't find the original posting in my Activity so I approached from the link in my e-mail saying you had replied. Now it says the area is restricted. What's up with that?
Rod
Here's the original post:
I used "Erase Free Space" with Disk Utility after trashing several files I no longer wanted on the hard drive or recovered. I used "Zero Out Deleted Files" option. It took over 12 hours before an error message appeared "Your start up disk is almost full. You need to make more space available on your start up disk by deleting files." I thought that was what I was doing. Disk Utility continued but got stuck on "Creating Temporary File." I force quit Disk Utility after several more hours. I had to manually shut down the computer because the restart command wouldn't work. It rebooted and appears to be OK. Evidently, this temporary file consumes significant amounts of disk space. This is an older iMac with 10.4.11 (18 GHz PowerPC G5) - I know, pretty old but I still have OS 9 on it and several files I need to extract before I trash it.
1. Should I do nothing? The iMac seems to be working fine.
2. How do I know if this Temporary File exists and consuming space? Spotlight doesn't find it. Where is it?
3. Is my start up disk in fact almost full? How would I know that?

Here's what I tried to say in my response that I wasn't authorize to make:
I can't seem to reply to your response BD . . . says I'm not authorize . . . so I'll try to reply to my original post.
Thanks BD for your reply. Here's the info on the drive: 1.3 TB capacity with 1,017 GB available. Eventually I will recycle the computer at Best Buy who guarantees the hard drive will be erased. I just want to get all my files off first. I'll just do another Erase Free Space and see, as you suggest, if there are any files to be zeroed out. Maybe there aren't any. I've extracted most of what I want but am debating how to move the entire iPhoto library to an external drive so I can access it from my Mavericks machine. Can I just drag and drop the iPhoto Library, or do I need to export it somehow?

Disk Utility - Erase Free Space - Creating Temporary File Freeze

I used "Erase Free Space" with Disk Utility after trashing several files I no longer wanted on the hard drive or recovered. I used "Zero Out Deleted Files" option. It took over 12 hours before an error message appeared "Your start up disk is almost full. You need to make more space available on your start up disk by deleting files." I thought that was what I was doing. Disk Utility continued but got stuck on "Creating Temporary File." I force quit Disk Utility after several more hours. I had to manually shut down the computer because the restart command wouldn't work. It rebooted and appears to be OK. Evidently, this temporary file consumes significant amounts of disk space. This is an older iMac with 10.4.11 (18 GHz PowerPC G5) - I know, pretty old but I still have OS 9 on it and several files I need to extract before I trash it.
1. Should I do nothing? The iMac seems to be working fine.
2. How do I know if this Temporary File exists and consuming space? Spotlight doesn't find it. Where is it?
3. Is my start up disk in fact almost full? How would I know that?
Thanks!

Then I would not do any secure erasing. It's exceptionally time consuming and unnecessary. Before you take it in for recycling boot it from your OS X installer DVD. Do this:
Drive Partition and Format
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
A one-pass Zero Data option is all that is required to prevent access to your erased files.

Need help with the "Erase Free Space" disk utility

When I use Disk Utilities to Erase Free Space (I use the single zero mode) I get a message telling me,
"Your Startup Disk is almost Full,
you need to make more space available
on your startup disk by deleting files."
This occurs about 90% of the way through the process (based on where the blue bar is at the time) during the "Creating Temporary File" portion of the process. I know from past experience that I will remain in this portion of the process forever unless I press the "Skip" button to complete the process.
My questions,
1. What is the startup disk and why is it full?
2. What should I do about the Your Startup Disk is Almost Full warning?
3. Is my computer actually talking about "regular" disk space (I currently have about 9GB of 80GB free but have seen this warning with 30GB available as well).
4. When I press "Skip" and the blue bar continues to complete the process, have I actually erased free space?
PBG4 15" 80GB HD 1GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4)

The Disk Utility does the erase by creating large temporary files, writing to them, then deleting them. While doing this, OSX may notice the lack of free space on the disk. This is normal, but could cause problems if you are also running some applications that want some disk space. If you let if finish, it should delete the temporary files and free the disk space.
I prefer to run the Disk Utility from the Tiger install disk when doing a Verify, Repair, or Erase Free Space on my boot disk, so I know I won't be interfering with anything running.

Erase free space erased everything

On my MacBook with OS X 10.6.8, I tried to erase free space (zero out) on a pretty full 2TB external HDD using Disk Utility (still 100 GB free space).
I have done this lots of times before to free up a little more space. When I did it today, the progress message said "unmount volume", then "erasing volume"! The whole process took only 10 seconds. After that, there were 2TB of free space and all my files were missing.
Does it seem only the partition was erased since the erasing only took 10 secs? The external HDD only had one partition. Although there is a volume now just no data in it. What's the best way to recover these files? Should I use a Knoppix Live CD and disk duplication? (I'm just learning now how to do this)
I'm trying Prosoft's Data Rescue 3, and that does not work well I will try Photorec with a live cd. I'm trying to understand what happened with Disk Utility - normally it would take a while to erase 2tb of data even unsecurely not the 10 sec thing that happened to me

Tign wrote:
Thanks Lupunus
Looks like I erased the volume - so is your above suggestion still the best way to recover the data?
If there where no writing on the drive since the operation, you will get your data back.
A good tools is Testdisk -> http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
If you are unsure of your own skills, you may alternatively send the disk to a recovery service like Kroll. But this will ease your wallet by around 1000$
Take a look in the discussions history here. There was a similar problem a week or two ago and the thread contains a lot of useful information.
I will look in my own history too. If I find the thread, I'll post the link here.
Cheers - Lupunus
Got it --> https://discussions.apple.com/message/16110105#16110105
Message was edited by: lupunus

Erase Free Space SCARE !!!

I decided to erase the free space (50GB) on my eMac using Disk Utility.
On selecting "Erase Free Space" all seemed well and I was given an estimated time of 20 minutes.
At the end of this time, the progress bar was near the end of the line when a new message appeared which said something like "Writing or creating file".
This continued for several minutes and the progress bar did not appear to be moving so I pressed the "Skip" button and for a few more minutes nothing seemed to be happening. It certainly didn't stop.
In desperation I quit Disk Utility even though a warning came up saying it COULD leave my HD unusable.
I discovered that my HD had 0KB of free space.
Using "WhatSize" I found that the missing 50GB were in a "Temporary Items" file.
I tried to trash them but was told one of the items was in use, so I restarted the computer and was able to empty the trash.
The whole computer was fine and back to normal.
However, it was a worrying experience.
What did I do wrong ?
Ian.

I think you'll be fine. All that "erase free space" process does is eliminate all your free space with a big file, then delete that file. If you are really paranoid, you can have it overwrite with random data - seven times. Yes, it can take forever. Because it does fill up your drive, you shouldn't do anything else while it is running. Finally, there is a possibility that your machine could crash if your hard disk is bad. Part of your free space could be a bad place on your disk that you have just never accessed before. This is not likely, but possible.
In the future, you should consider creating a large encrypted disk image for sensitive files. Do not use FileVault. Just create a single disk image that you mount when you want to access your private files. You can even create unencrypted aliases to encrypted files inside the image. Make sure you have secure virtual memory turned on too. If you delete a file from that image, it is already encrypted so nothing to worry about. It is possible that some applications could create temporary files in unencrypted space, but you can't do much about that. This is about as good as you can get.

"Erase Free Space"- DU Not Responding?!

     Started "Erase Free Space" in disk utility about 36 hours ago. I had nearly 1TB of free space which I knew was more than the usual amount someone has when they perform this task but I was attempting to speed up game playing as after a year or so, excess of deleted saved games and game data has gradually slowed game performance down some. I read that this might help so I ran it...
     It took 24 hours to do the initial run through up until the "creating temporary secondary file" notification. It looked as though it was about to complete and I received the usual error message that apple says to ignore about no remaining free space or something to that effect. However, out of nowhere the spin wheel started, the Disk Utility window went grey and everything seemed to have frozen.
     After reading several peoples experiences with things like this I was confident that it would resolve in a few minutes, maybe half an hour even and then most likely resolve itself. It was late so I went to bed and when I got up it was still in the same place as I left it...greyed out and spin wheeled.
     So then I went to the Activity Monitor to check the Disk Usage as I knew that I could view the progress through that. As far as I'm aware, after creating the temporary file, as it already did, it is supposed to start looking like free space is "disappearing" as it puts the recently overwritten free space into its newly created temp file and then eventually deletes the file.
     Problem is, the Activity Monitor shows the Disk Utility as "Not Responding" along with Safari and Mail having the same message, yet at the same time I see the free space on my HD SLOWLY (20-100kb/s) doing that "dissapearing" act. So is the Disk Utility doing its job? Is it hung up some how? If it is working then why is it moving at such an incredibly slow rate? Should I be concerned or take some sort of action or just wait while this resolves itself in who knows how long from now?
Advice on this would be very much appreciated as I am not a very experienced Mac user.

apple customer 1 billion wrote:
There aren't that many files to lose in the long run. It's more a matter of avoiding the risk out of convinience for not losing the few that I have. So correct, I have no back up since there isn't much to back up, hence the nearly 1TB of overwritting free space in the first place. Unfortunately, I realized just how long this process takes after I began it, and now it seems to late...
If I did restart, what would likely happen?
Possibilities I've come across:
1.won't be able to log in because theres no more free space
2.I'd have to search for the temp file and manually delete it (provided I had some extra space to do it)
3.might lose all data and have to reinstall everything
Could be any or all 3
Is there a safe way to either:
1.Restart with little to no complications listed above
2.Safely end this task without some sort of unfixable complication occuring
3.Boost its processing so that I can resonably wait it out
There may not be, but I might as well check around before I go straight to Restart is what I was thinking.
No, no and no unfortunately, patience or a leap of faith are the choices

'Erase Free Space Utility' problem

Hi everyone, I wonder if you could spare your time in helping me with what I believe is a bit of a fixable dilemma but I just am not sure how to fix the problem.
I ran the 'Erase Free Space' option on my hard disk through the Disc Utility application but unfortunatly the application crashed at around 30% completion and I am left with only 6.5MBs of free disk space (previously being 72MBs free).
I have found out how to fix the problem but really do not know how to access '/var/root/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems' as explained below to obtain and remove the files 'EFTFile1.sparseimage'.
I would be very very grateful if someone could point me in the right direction.
Many thanks.
"Disk Utility accomplishes the erase feature by creating large sparse image files in a preset directory. It then deletes them with the srm tool (secure remove) and an overwrite pattern of your choice. If Disk Utility is interrupted, this sparse image is left on the disk just taking up space. Starting another free space erase session makes another file, instead of cleaning up the previous one. So, as there are no checks in Disk Utility for cleaning up this failed process, so you have to hunt it down manually.
There are a variety of ways of doing this, but I’ll cut to the chase and give you the answer. The files are created in /var/root/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems and are sequential variations of the name EFTFile1.sparseimage. Simply remove these files (as root) to reclaim your free space and then start the process again to finish the task."
Message was edited by: Chris Kerr

Chris Kerr wrote:
I ran the 'Erase Free Space' option on my hard disk through the Disc Utility application but unfortunatly the application crashed at around 30% completion and I am left with only 6.5MBs of free disk space (previously being 72MBs free).
72 MB is way too little disk space for Mac OS X to run properly. You need to delete some files in order to give Mac OS X and applications more space. If that's why you're running "Erase Free Space", then you're not doing the right thing. Erase Free Space will overwrite all the free space on your hard drive with random data: the free space will remain free, but you will not get any extra free disk space after doing this. Erase Free Space's purpose is to make deleted data unrecoverable, for example if you deleted many sensitive files without using Secure Empty Trash and want to make sure the they can't be recovered.
You should be able to use Terminal to remove the sparseimage, but you should really delete or move a lot of stuff to another hard drive first; you need at least a few GB of free space if you want Mac OS X to run normally.

What does erase free space do?

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