I just lost 150Gbytes of my HD

[Soulstorm]

Hello,

I just deleted some Fusion virtual machines from my HD, of total size 150Gbytes, and I didn't see the free space going up even one bit!

I tried rebooting, repairing permissions, checking the disk with disk utility, nothing worked.

Any ideas how can I get those GBytes back?

15" retina MBP 2013

 

[yjchua95]

Hello,

I just deleted some Fusion virtual machines from my HD, of total size 150Gbytes, and I didn't see the free space going up even one bit!

I tried rebooting, repairing permissions, checking the disk with disk utility, nothing worked.

Any ideas how can I get those GBytes back?

15" retina MBP 2013

Did you move them to trash or did you select 'keep files'?

 

[Soulstorm]

Did you move them to trash or did you select 'keep files'?

"Keep files"? What is that option? I right clicked on them, and I selected "Move to trash" and then deleted them, by right clicking on the trash icon and selecting "Empty Trash"

 

[janitor3]

Even though you clicked "empty trash", they're still on a file on your computer.
Next time you want to empty trash, click on finder on the toolbar, then click on "secure empty trash".
I did that last week, and though my trash can was empty, I had 127,670 files to be deleted.

 

[Soulstorm]

Even though you clicked "empty trash", they're still on a file on your computer.
Next time you want to empty trash, click on finder on the toolbar, then click on "secure empty trash".
I did that last week, and though my trash can was empty, I had 127,670 files to be deleted.

When you click "Empty Trash" your computer is telling that your disk that the space taken by these files is now free to be overwritten, but it does not actually erase the files (setting all disk blocks to zero), it merely changes some flags. That's where "secure empty trash" differs: it rewrites all space taken by these files to "0".

But even the former option should show the correct available space. Secure empty trash does not have anything to do with it.

I waited for 30 minutes, and the problem was fixed. Seems that the high volume of data and the high number of files deleted forced OS X to perform a minor de-frag session, which takes time. I opened the Activity after deletion, and saw it working. When it stopped, the problem stopped. Interestingly enough, the deletion process continued even after rebooting - but there was no user interface element telling me that a process was going on. Hence, my post.