Why doesn't my disk space free up after moving files to an external drive?

I have a 750GB internal HD but film a lot of movies. To free up space, I have moved my iMovie clips off to a secondary hard drive, but I have not seen my free disk space free up on my Macbook pro. Why is this? I moved, not copied the files. They only show now on the external hard drive.
I am looking at the free space in Finder > Get Info.
I have easily moved a few hundred GB off to the new drive, but my internal HD still shows as over 500Gb used.
Help!

Have a look Here...
Where did my Disk Space go?
And Here...
http://macmost.com/what-to-do-when-your-hard-drive-is-full.html

Similar Messages

Why isn't Hard Disk space becoming available after I delete files?

My wife filled up her MacBook's hard disk to the point where she only had 300 or so MB of storage space left. I transferred about 32GB of movies and photos onto an external disk and deleted the files off of the MacBook. Those files are no longer on the MacBook and they are on the hard disk. However, there is only about 14GB of free space on her MacBook now. What happened to the other 18GB of space that should have become free? Is there something else I need to do to free up this space? I made sure to empty the trash after moving the files into the trash.
Computer information:
OS: OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion
Processor: 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 8GB 1067MHz DDR3
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 9400M 256MB
Model: MacBook, 13-inch, Late 2009
Model Identifier: MacBook6,1
Hard Drive: Toshiba MK2555GSXF with 250.06GB Capacity

You might try OmniDiskSweeper to get a better idea about what's eating up the space. I wold also reset the pram
Resetting NVRAM / PRAM
Shut down your Mac.
Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
Turn on the computer.
Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
Release the keys.

I keep getting a Warning that I'm running out of disk space. Even after I deleted all of my photos and e-mail I still show 0 available. Please help!

I keep getting a Warning that I'm running out of disk space. Even after I deleted all of my photos and e-mail I still show 0 available space. Please help!

Correct KiltedTim the iPhone does not have a disk drive, and it does give an error message about running out of disk space. I'm here searching for how to clear it and/or what causes it. A friends 8gb iphone 3G has started giving her that message. It is not jailbroken, has no videos, 400 songs, 20 apps. The system information says there is 0 bytes free. There is 4.6 Gb of "other" data taking up the remaining free space. None of the few apps on the phone I expect would take up that much space with data. Even her emails and saved text messages shouldn't fill 4GB. New iPhone coming in the next couple of days. Easiest to just reset the old one after the upgrade and redownload the apps to make sure not to mess things up.

Why does the new operating system not delete the moved files from their original location - it seems like an enormous waste of space, time and effort to clean up every file once you've moved it

Why does the new operating system not delete the moved files from their original locations - it seems like an enormous waste of space, time and effort to clean up every file once you've moved it - also, when transferring large amounts of files it becomes a very large problem remembering which files were transferred and which not.

You're going to need to be more specific, as I'm not quite sure I understand what you're talking about.
If you're referring to copying from an external hard drive or flash drive, and you want to actually move files rather than copy them, you can hold down the option key to force it to do a "move" rather than a "copy." This is not new behavior, though... the Mac OS has worked this way as long as I can recall (and I've been using it since 1984).
If you're having a problem with trying to move files from one place to another on a single drive causing them to be copied instead, that is likely because of some permissions issue preventing you from actually being able to move them.

HT4623 hi i have ipad 2 and i want to connect my external hard disk to transfer data from ipad to directly to external drive?

hi i have ipad 2 and i want to connect my external hard disk to transfer data from ipad to directly to external drive?

Only if you have an app and a wifi hard drive like this
http://www.seagate.com/external-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/wireless/wirele ss-plus/?cmpid=ppc-_-satellite-_-g-_-us-_-wifi_hard_drive-_-e

Why doesn't my free disk space increase when I delete files on Mountain Lion?

I just upgraded my Macbook Air to Mountain Lion. Now whenever I delete files my free disk space doesn't increase. I show only 500Mb free space now (out of 120Gb), even though I just deleted 50Gb of files. I tried to reinstall Mountain Lion, but it said I don't have enough space. I have a very simple setup, with no external apps except for Office 2011. I am NOT using Time Machine (I have it set to "off"), or any other backup programs, so I don't think this is the problem.
Also, I noticed that whenever I move a file to the trash, I am asked for my password, which is extremely annoying.
I am living in France, far from the nearest Apple store. Can anyone help? Thanks.

slsperry wrote:
p.s. does anyone know how to get Finder to stop asking for my password every time I move a file to the trash? this did not happen with Snow Leopard, and is really tiresome. thanks
I think you should try repairing permissions on your Home folder...
http://osxdaily.com/2011/11/15/repair-user-permissions-in-mac-os-x-lion/
Startup holding command-r keys.
You will boot into the Repair Utilities screen. On top, in the Menu Bar click the Utilities item then select Terminal.
In the Terminal window, type resetpassword and hit Return.
The Password reset utility launches, but you’re not going to reset the password. Instead, click on the icon for your Mac’s hard drive at the top. From the drop-down below it, select the user account where you are having issues.
At the bottom of the window, you’ll see an area labeled ‘Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs’. Click the Reset button there.
The reset process takes a couple of minutes. When it’s done, quit the programs you’ve opened and restart your Mac. Notice that ‘Spotlight’ starts re-indexing immediately.

Why does Tiger need so much disk space free?

Is this a drawback to a Unix based OS? I know there are a number of bells and whistles to OSX.
But it just seemed odd that with the old Mac OS I could go very low on disk space (yet have plenty of RAM free) and the mac would still boot up, and store files fine. I would not experiene slowdowns, nor other issues.
My Performa 6360 had a 6GB hard drive and it ran OS 9.1. There were times when free disk space would go below a gig. Yes I had problems, but the problems were extension conflicts, web browser issues, and other issues with the OS, not necessarily because of disk space.
Thanks,
John

John,
I found an authorized service center would charge me $80 to upgrade the hard drive of my Powerbook. An 100 GB laptop hard drive can be gotten for $150 from:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Toshiba/MK1032GAX/
and an 80 GB for $120:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/ST98823A/
So in reality we are only talking just over a couple hundred.
Of course a cheaper option would be to burn to CD or DVD the data you don't use frequently at least twice and take it off your system. To find out where files are, I've made this FAQ:
http://www.macmaps.com/safetodeleteormove.html
as well as this FAQ:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

Free disk space not changing after deleting (large) photos

Hi,
I wasn't sure whether to post this on the iPhoto board or on the MBA one, since it's not clear if it's a system-level issue or not. Anyway, I had about 30GB of free space on my 256GB MBA and the other day I deleted four or five albums of photos from my DSLR that I'd downloaded to my computer, after I made backups of them elsewhere. In total there were about 3,500 photos, roughly 24MB each on average. I made sure that after deleting them, I deleted my iPhoto Trash as well as the system Trash. Neverless, my level of free space hardly budged and if anything, it decreased slightly. I've read several threads saying to wait a while as sometimes the system takes a delay to adjust - that's fine.
It's now almost five days later and the situation remains the same, if not worse. I ran DaisyDisk and aside from the usual large folders (my movies in iTunes etc, none of which had been added to since I deleted all those photos), the only one I couldn't recognise was this folder iLifeAssetManagement (9GB). I know that there are a few threads about this one, and most people seem to suggest you can clear this if you're happy to lose the content in your Photo Stream. The thing is, I've looked through some of the images in this folder and I'm quite positive that a number of them are from the DSLR albums (there are CR2 files, which I believe is Canon's exclusive RAW format). Some of the others are definitely from my iCloud Photo stream. I'm more than glad to lose all the DSLR ones, though I'd like to keep the iCloud ones and I don't really want to have to sort through 5,000-odd files. I'm positive that this folder is related to why I never gained that free space.
Has anybody else had issues like this and any suggestions for clearing this folder of all the files I already meant to delete, whilst keeping the others? Or have you had issues relating to this? Any help much appreciated.
Thanks.

If you've installed third-party software called "Disk Drill," I suggest you remove it according to the developer'sinstructions. If you prefer to keep the software, refer to the developer for support. Otherwise, see below.
You may notice a difference in available space statistics between Disk Utility, Finder, and Get Info inspectors. This is expected and can be safely ignored. The Finder displays the available space on the disk without accounting for the local snapshots, because local snapshots will surrender their disk space if needed.
About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs

Why XI keeps filling disk space

Hi guru,
I have installed XI 7.0 and upgrade to SP11. just after the successfully upgrade to SP11, I check the disk and there is 8G space. 2 monthes passed, now only 200M space left. I then deactviate all adapter and no message is processing by XI, but XI still keeps filling disk space, I want to know why.
besides, could you tell me normally what components are filling disk space. AE? IS? SLD?.....

Hi, Chen
Well, usually J2EE stack's logs have maximum size limit. So, it
is not the reason.
Regarding ABAP stack, for some reason, ABAP's dev traces grows
over GB sometimes.
So, could you check under the folder /usr/sap/<SID>/DVEBMGS00/work and
trace files?
Good Luck
Sejoon

Should We Leave 10% of Disk Space Free??

I'm wondering if anyone knows whether we should be leaving the usual ten percent of drive space free on these SSDs in the iPads like we should with normal disk drives? I've been looking around to see if anyone is talking about this but can't find any discussion. I'm having a hard enough time not totally filling up my iPad so it would be tough to leave 10% available for system operations.
(for those that don't know, with the spinning platter style drives it's important to leave at least ten percent of your drive space free so the system can read/write to it. Completely filling up a disk drive can cause serious corruption. I'm just not sure how SSD works.)

You actually don't need to leave a fixed percentage free .... you just need some free space in general.
For example, if you buy a 40 Gb drive, you may want to leave 4 Gb free (I would personally only worry when I got down to about 500 Meg free). But if you bought a 720 Gb drive, no way should you leave 72 Gb free and unused for "system work".
In any case, I haven't heard anyone suggest that you need to treat SSD's any differently than mechanical drives.

Free disk space significantly smaller after reinstalling

After installing the update for iTunes 8.0.2, I was one of the lucky few who couldn't get their macbooks to boot back up after shutting down after successfully rebooting.
After an apple care phone call and visit to the Genius Bar, all is good again.
But, at the Bar, they reinstalled leopard. I noticed just a little while ago that my free disk space is significantly less than what it was before all of this happened.
Do I need to delete the old install or something (where and how)? He didn't do any archiving as far as I could tell. He just plugged my macbook into the orange thing and reinstalled it.
Message was edited by: heymego

the guy at the genius bar clearly did an archive and install so that your old user data and applications were preserved. that creates a "Previous Systems" folder at the top level of the hard drive which contains your old system. If everything is working ok you should delete that folder and empty trash. once you do the lost space will be reclaimed.

New mac mini, why so much hard disk space used

Hi All
Just bought a new Mac Mini, 1.4 with the 80gb disk,
After powering up and setting up etc, i noticed that over 10gb of the 80gb hard disk was already used out of the box!!!
How come all that disk space is used, im sure the OS doesnt need that amount of room? I have found a folder of about 1.2gb with a load of garage band samples and loops in, but where is the rest hiding???? Seems a whole waste of space to me??
Thanks
Rich
Mac Mini Mac OS X (10.4.3) Belkin USB and Firewire Hub, Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse

You have heard correctly, most Mac software, including GarageBand, can be deleted by moving the application (or whole folder if it's in one) to the Trash & emptying the Trash. Some programs may install some support files, but usually not until they are run for the first time. Those few programs that do scatter bits around (can you say Microsoft?) should come with an uninstaller.
There are freeware/shareware programs to remove unneeded language files. DeLocalizer & Monolingual come to mind.
But, since you are setting this Mac mini up from scratch, you might want to do what I do with a new Mac. I erase & reinstall the OS & bundled software from the CD/DVDs that come with it, doing a custom install of both so that I get only what I want. For me, this was important because I don't need any additional printer drivers & I already had full versions of Office & iWork to install.
Peggy

Available space on MacBook Pro Doesn't Update After Moving Files to iCloud Drive

I need to free up space on my MacBook Pro and have moved about 10 GB of files from my MacBook Pro to my iCloud Drive; however, the available space on my MacBook Pro doesn't show that 10 GB additional space available. How do I get my MacBook Pro available space to recognize that additional 10 GB as available?

No. Sorry. You may want to look into something like the WD My Cloud drive. I've seen the 2TB version refurbished on the WD site for as low as $99 recently. I considered one myself, but I'm not pushed for space as I have an iMac at home with a 500 GB internal drive and 4TB of external storage attached. I don't need that much accessible remotely. What I do need I sync with Dropbox or OneDrive (which also behave the same way as iCloud drive in that they sync to local storage and still consume disk space).

Disk space eaten up with no files

Stand alone exchange 2013 (virtualized on vmware 5.1) - Windows 2012 R2 Standard edtion
Recently have noticed strange behavior.. of no mails being processed... after troubleshooting reckoned of low disk space on drive where transport queue was...we increased disk size.
Disk size allocated is 60GB
transport queue size is approx 4GB and still it shows only 10GB remaining.. as there is no other content than transport queue files.
Similar is with our database drive.... database size is approx 60GB... (We have enterprise vault hence DB size doesn't increase much)... drive size is 159GB.... but free space is only 13GB... same here no files other than database....(Transaction logs are
in different drive.
Checked if snapshots are there.. or content in recycle bin.. but there is nothing...
how to reclaim this space... or get visibility what is eating up this. so much... we can't keep on increase size of disk...
Cheers VP

First check the database size and log folder size by this command
Get-MailboxDatabase -Status | select ServerName,Name,DatabaseSize,EdbFilePath
Make sure logs are getting truncated by your backup
Please check these if database and log files not consuming the space
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2014/05/13/how-to-clean-up-the-winsxs-directory-and-free-up-disk-space-on-windows-server-2008-r2-with-new-update.aspx
Try server cleanup utility:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/15221.enabling-disk-cleanup-utility-in-windows-server-2012.aspx
Thanks, MAS
Please mark as helpful if you find my comment helpful or as an answer if it does answer your question. That will encourage me - and others - to take time out to help you.

External disk space gone crazy after upgrade to SL

Hi,
I have just upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and am now running 10.6.3. I have an iomega 320GB external USB hard disk which I use to back up via Time Machine, and also to periodically back up a virtual machine which is not backed up by Time Machine. Prior to upgrading, there was about 3GB of space on the iomega drive, the TM backups were taking about 251GB and my virtual machine backup was taking the remaining 66GB.
The first time I connected the iomega drive after upgrading to SL, I wanted to deleted the backup copy of the virtual machine (66GB), so I navigated to it in the Finder, right-clicked on the folder and selected "Move to trash", whereupon it duly disappeared. (I thought it slightly odd that I didn't hear the drive making any sound – I thought I should be able to hear it pysically deleting the file.) I then tried to copy a new virtual machine file of smaller size onto the iomega drive, and got an error message that there was not enough disk space. I selected the drive in the L/H pane of the Finder window and hit Cmd-I to get info: this told me the following:
Capacity 319.73GB
Available 1.89GB
Used 317.84GB
I know that the files I just deleted from the iomega were around 66GB, so why isn't there at least 66GB of free space? I have not run Time Machine since upgrading, so there is no way the TM backup set can have somehow expanded to fill up the additional space. I have run Disk Utility and tried repairing the drive, but this has made no difference. I then selected the Time Machine backup set on the iomega drive, which is a folder named "Backups.backupdb", and hit Cmd-I to get info. The get info window popped up and said it was calculating the size of the item. Some six-and-a-half hours later, it finally concluded its calculations and told me that the backup set is... wait for it... 4.54TB! (4,458,364,261,372B to be precise...)
What is going on? I'm aware that SL uses a different basis to measure disk space, but this does not explain where 66GB of freed up space has suddenly "disappeared" to, or why this backup set appears to be 14 times the physical size of the disk it's on!
Am I going to have to erase the drive and lose all my previous TM backups, or is there some other way around this?
Thanks in advance,
Rob

After you selected move to Trash, did you remember to then empty the Trash? When you move something to the Trash the Finder puts it in the invisible Trash folder of the drive in question, and there it stays until the Trash is emptied with the drive mounted.
I have many crackpop theories about things, and one of them is that Apple has somehow messed up the Finder's ability to calculate sizes in the newly rewritten Snow Leopard Finder. Mind you, Finder has not been very good at doing this for a very long time anyway, but it seems to me it has gotten even worse. Nonetheless it should be able to get an answer that makes sense using the GetInfo function for a drive, although it will take longer than it seems to me it ought to do (but in the range of minutes rather than hours). Thus GetInfo on my Time drive shows
Capacity 249.93GB
Available 140.95GB
Used 108.97GB
A result returned remarkably quickly (for a change). Using the disk usuage command in Terminal, where the results returned are shown in the "old" size format rather than the new PR influenced format, shows this:
NoobiX:~ francine$ sudo du -cxhd 1 /Volumes/Time
Password:
1.4M /Volumes/Time/.fseventsd
1.5G /Volumes/Time/.Spotlight-V100
0B /Volumes/Time/.TemporaryItems
0B /Volumes/Time/.Trashes
0B /Volumes/Time/.vol
5.4G /Volumes/Time/Applications
77G /Volumes/Time/Backups.backupdb
7.6M /Volumes/Time/bin
0B /Volumes/Time/cores
0B /Volumes/Time/dev
0B /Volumes/Time/home
7.0G /Volumes/Time/Library
0B /Volumes/Time/net
0B /Volumes/Time/Network
510M /Volumes/Time/private
5.2M /Volumes/Time/sbin
3.8G /Volumes/Time/System
3.8G /Volumes/Time/Users
1.0G /Volumes/Time/usr
4.0K /Volumes/Time/Volumes
100G /Volumes/Time
100G total
Terminal takes a bit of time to return the above results, but again it is in the range of some minutes, not hours. If you DID remember to empty the Trash after moving the files to it, you might try running the du command in Terminal to see where the stuff is.
Copy and paste this into Terminal
sudo du -cxhd 1
press the spacebar, then drag and drop the mounted volume into the Terminal from the Desktop. Press return, enter your admin password (which is not echoed to the screen in any way whatsoever), press return again, and go have a cup of coffee while the sizes are calculated.
Finally, the repair disk function in Disk Utility is not particularly robust. To truly repair a disk with siginificant problems you need something like Disk Warrior.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Why doesn't my disk space free up after moving files to an external drive?

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