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No memory freed after having deleted 60GB of items.

V

Valmount

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 13, 2011
10
0
MacBook Pro 5.5
Mac OS X 10.6.8
160 GB hard-drive

So, I felt like getting rid of the useless junk lying around on my mbp today. It turns out I have way more useless files than I could've imagined, I really felt good about making that much free room from well... practically nothing. However, after having deleted the files, I was still left with 16GB of free space. I kept on testing it out and after a while I came to the conclusion that no matter how much space I free, it still won't generate any more free space.

So, any ideas ? I tried disk repair/permissions repair by booting from the disk, no change. Also, I am no going to format the drive.
 
Let's get the obvious out of the way first... you did empty the trash right?
Just have to check

You can use a program like Grand Perspective or Disk Inventory X to find all your disk space and how it is allocated
 
I found a lot of memory consuming stuff in hidden folders, especially in one called .trash or something similar. It won't let me delete the files although they're the ones I've deleted. It says I don't have permission to edit the files.

Also, my library folder is 15 GB, of which 11 GB is application support. I don't really recall 15 GB taken by the system files in the past. Anything to be concerned about?

Then, there's another hidden folder called "private" which takes up 3gb and another called usr that takes up 1gb.

One thing I forgot to mention before - it won't let me just move the items to the trashcan, it immediately asks whether I would like to permanently delete them. This one started a while ago but I wasn't really bothered by it as I don't tend to keep important files in the trashcan either way.
 
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your permissions are broken on your trash directory, which is why you can't empty it, nor move items to it.

open a terminal window and enter the following:

sudo chown -R <your user id>:staff ~/.Trash

You should then be able to empty your Trash and reclaim your disk space.
 
Hmh, well it's good to know what's wrong with the system. This command doesn't seem to work though.

"MBP:~ Rego$ sudo chown -R <Rego>:staff ~/.Trash
-bash: Rego$: No such file or directory"

Rego is the name of the user, doesn't seem to work. Also tired Rego$ just in case as it showed up in the terminal :p.

As the error seems to be about the .Trash folder itself, I checked it up just to be sure and the folder is indeed named .Trash
 
Thank you. That seemed to work just fine.
Still, would it be safe to delete the application support folder at all? It takes up a lot of space. I've managed to get around 20 GB of free space now, which is great for a start. It should be around 60-80 considering all the crap I've deleted so far though.

The thing is, the only folders that actually should be taking up a lot of space are my applications, downloads, music and movies folders. These add up to around 80 GB. So, as my system folders really didnt use to wheigh in at multiple GB's, I'd really like to cut down on those. Any idea what could've been gathering up like this and what's safe to delete and what isn't? As in, any common folders where useless backups or something gather up that could safely be deleted?
 
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Valmount said:
Thank you. That seemed to work just fine.
Still, would it be safe to delete the application support folder at all? It takes up a lot of space. I've managed to get around 20 GB of free space now, which is great for a start. It should be around 60-80 considering all the crap I've deleted so far though.
Click to expand...

No, it's certainly not safe to delete the application support folder
 
I predict that in the next day or two we're going to see a message from the OP asking why his system has started to crash, or won't start....

It may just be an informal use of vocabulary....but I'm sensing the OP doesn't quite know enough to be messing around with hidden files in the Terminal.

Dear stop and get some advice from someone who can noodle around your system and see what you have done.

... memory consuming stuff in hidden folders, especially in one called .trash or something similar. It won't let me delete the files although they're the ones I've deleted
Click to expand...
 
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