Deleting permantly to free up space

[macuser9876543]

I recently got a message on my computer saying "Your startup disk is almost full." Then it would say, I can't save this particular thing because there is not enough free space, or something of the like. I took a couple of hours one day and moved a TON of pictures off and put them on a flash drive and then deleted them all, and emptied my trash bin. I also deleted a TON of word docs and other things that were junk that I didn't need on my computer. Somehow, after doing all this, I have not freed up any space! It will not allow me to move any more pictures onto my computer from my camera, nor save a picture from the net, for example.
I was told I can "Secure Empty Trash" (?) but it is greyed out and won't allow me to click it.
How can I free up space?? Do I need to do a format of my computer or something?

 

[scienide09]

Before deleting much more, use a program like Disk Inventory X to check out what's eating up your disk space. It will give you a nice picture of your big files, what kind they are, and where they're located.

 

[Bennieboy©]

or it could be your logs folder, look in library> Logs to see if anything there is getting too large

 

[Makosuke]

If you've moved a significant amount of stuff to the trash, then emptied the trash (secure or no), then that will free up space. If it didn't either there's some kind of corruption on the drive (see if Disk Utility has anything to say about it--there are posts explaining how to check the drive with it all over the forums here), or you weren't deleting as much as you thought you were.

One additional suggestion to those already made, if you don't do this regularly, is just restart; I've seen a lot of space get chewed up by swap files on computers that haven't been shut down/restarted for weeks or months, particularly if you're doing more than you have RAM for.

 

[Let's Sekuhara!]

Grand Perspective is another great free (and open source) app that will show you what data is consuming the most drive space on your disk.

Also note that if you drag files from the flash drive to the trash and empty the trash, you need to empty the trash while the flash drive is connected, otherwise the files that were trashed from the flash drive will continue to occupy space on that flash drive.
I know this doesn't exactly pertain to your question, but it's still a good thing to know.

 

[miles01110]

Before deleting much more, use a program like Disk Inventory X to check out what's eating up your disk space. It will give you a nice picture of your big files, what kind they are, and where they're located.

Disk Inventory X hasn't been updated since approximately 2005. Use Grand Perspective.

 

[mei7]

Startup Disk space message - but with lots of free space?

Hi all,

I've just started getting the "Startup Disk space low" message (today) on my iMac, and disk info for my Mac HD says that there are 331gb free. This never happened on my G4 iBook, even when I had 10gb of space left free. Have already checked logs and emptied trash.

Could it be something to do with allocated cache space? And if so, how do I increase that?

Hardware Overview:
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 3.06 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

Thanks for any tips and ideas. I'm currently running Grand Perspective and will update if there is any helpful info from it.