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matt.ksisap

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 19, 2011
5
0
The hard drive on my Macbook that I bought in 2007 recently became full. I went through and moved about 55GB of files onto my external today and the deleted the originals from my Mac HD, but the HD info still says that it's full! It says that the entire 111GB is completely full and it still won't allow me to put any other files onto the computer.

Is there something I'm missing? Did I actually not delete these files from my HD, or is there something else that I need to do here? It doesn't really seem like it should be this complicated. Thanks!
 

matt.ksisap

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 19, 2011
5
0
Yeah I made sure I emptied it right after I deleted the files from the hard drive... I wish that was the case though haha.
 

jent

macrumors 6502a
Mar 31, 2010
892
567
There may be a system process that is snatching up any free space. Download and run DiskInventoryX or DaisyDisk and see what's taking up the most space. Once I had a system log file constantly being written to and filling up my hard drive to the max.
 

matt.ksisap

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 19, 2011
5
0
I don't have enough space to download this, though. Can I do something to specify where it downloads? It won't let me because there's no space on the HD. And the problem is that I can't make any space. How can I download this onto the computer?
 

matt.ksisap

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 19, 2011
5
0
So I downloaded Disk Inventory X onto my external from my other computer (duh, should have done that before) and ran it from the external on my mac. It says the file that's taking up all the space is matthewengle.sparseimage. I am not sure what this is, but looked it up. This is what the File Vault backed everything up to? What do I do with this?
 

orfeas0

macrumors 6502a
Aug 21, 2010
971
1
Athens, Greece
So I downloaded Disk Inventory X onto my external from my other computer (duh, should have done that before) and ran it from the external on my mac. It says the file that's taking up all the space is matthewengle.sparseimage. I am not sure what this is, but looked it up. This is what the File Vault backed everything up to? What do I do with this?

that's a backup image. it's obvious it will eat a lot of disk space. Just delete that and have your backup done on an external HD not the internal one.
 

matt.ksisap

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 19, 2011
5
0
is it that easy? I read some other threads where people deleted that and said it screwed up their computer.
 

firestarter

macrumors 603
Dec 31, 2002
5,506
227
Green and pleasant land
Are you running filevault then?

If you are, the .sparseimage file IS all your files. Don't delete it!

.sparseimage files need to be compacted to recover space - so this could be the problem you're seeing... you deleted stuff from your filevault, but the OS didn't have enough space to compact its archive.

Do you have any large apps (iDVD, Final cut, Logic etc.) which are outside of filevault? I'd consider deleting a couple, then logging back into the computer, logging out and letting the OS (hopefully) do its automated filevault compaction on logout.
 
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