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

Thank you LauEl..... reinstalling Disk Drill, then going through their preferences menu I deleted the program, got a requestestor to remove protected files and voila! got my disk space back.. thanks!

I was having similar issues with my 13 inch macbook late 2009 running OS X 10.8.5. I would delete 30gb worth of music or pictures but I would not regain my disk space. I am not running time machine or DiskDrill. I was also having issues with the files being deleted automaticly instead of going to the trash folder. Turns out that they were related. I found this forum thread on the topic of files being auto deleted instead of going to the trash folder and it solved my issue with my disk space as well. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=835768

hope this helps

Can anyone explain this difference in free space. Get Info from MacOSX desktop icon shows 80GB free space, but going to About this Mac and looking at Storage only shows 64GB. Also, it was showing 65.5GB of free space but after deleting many files, free space has actually gone down to 64. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Domenico87,

The "Get Info" on the drive doesn't 'count' the space used for local snapshots for Time Machine. If you subtract the "Backups" from the Get Info reporting, you'll probably see that you actually do have 80GB 'free' on the drive.

To read more about local snapshots, see -> http://pondini.org/TM/30.html.

Clinton

Thanks mjpurdy2. The link as well as the solutions did come in very handy. The temporary Trashes seemingly were a big headache, given that the deletion of the folder gave me back around 65 GiGs of storage on my iHD.

For all, who are facing this very problem & are not using Time Machine or any other back up app on their macs & yeah - like me, are novices with the Terminal commands, ought to refer to http://http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=835768 for a quick 2 minute resolution to this problem. This will, for sure, do the trick.

😁

Why isn't this a setting in the Time Machine settings? It seems ridiculous that a user has to go to this forum, find a terminal command and enter it that way. What do you do if you want to start doing local back ups again?

I was having the same issue and found out that when we upgraded to iMovie 10, our computer created a separate iMovie 9 file in Finder with duplicate copies of all of our projects. I went into Finder, pulled up iMovie 9, and deleted the projects in there (after moving the same copies that were on iMovie 10 onto an external hard drive), and my disc space FINALLY went down. Hope this makes sense.

Many thanks it helped me.

Is this the best approach. Would it affect any way as we have removed the local backup option ?

Thanks

Jay

I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to add to it in case it helps someone else.

First of all, thank you, the Disk Drill tip was helpful.

I was getting 'out of memory' messages and things would lock up. There were several things that were going on:

1) The Disk Drill issue was keeping the space from freeing up.

2) The sleepimage file was quite large - which normally wouldn't be an issue, but it was so out of space I needed to free it up for a few minutes just to be able to move some files off the drive. It got rebuilt later on. (I deleted the sleepimage but people have warned not to touch the swap files, so don't).

3) Most importantly: This is basically for editors, but the main issue on my drive was that in Premiere, my preview files were set to an external drive, but the cache files were piling up on the hard drive in a hidden file (in Mountain Lion). 400 gigs worth (lots of previous crashes until I found the issue, which fwiw happens to be it doesn't like open audio waveforms in the timeline, so close your tracks unless you have to open them to make changes). Anyway, I thought I had deleted my cache, but it was piling up on the hard drive in the default location: home folder/library/preferences/adobe/common/media cache files. So it was filling up as fast as I could delete space.

It seems that cleaning the cache from inside Premiere didn't help much - maybe this was due to the cache files from the other crashed projects, not sure.

If this is your issue, go in through the finder, delete your cfa and pek files if they are left over from other projects, and let Premiere reconform your files. This freed up 350 gig of space.

Google how to get the hidden library file to show, someone can probably tell you how to do it, I don't recall what I did. But I did make an alias of the library folder to make it visible and easier to get to, and also stuck a shortcut to the media cache in the finder sidebar to keep an eye on those files.

Omni Disk Sweeper was the hero in helping me find the culprit.

Hope this advice proves useful to someone.

Thank you. Same problem, same solution. :)