While recording a movie in Photo Booth, my Mac ran out of storage space, but Photo Booth kept recording. When I finished recording the movie, Photo Booth quit without warning. What happened?

Question

While recording a movie in Photo Booth, my Mac ran out of storage space, but Photo Booth kept recording. When I finished recording the movie, Photo Booth quit without warning. What happened?

The movie wasn't saved.

Later, when I re-opened Photo Booth and took a photo, the photo froze in the frame and the reel below advanced as if preparing to add the most recent photo, but then never added it. I was able to click the Effects button, which would show the frozen image rendered with various effects, but I could not return to the active camera frame. Photo Booth remained in this dysfunctional state until I restarted it after freeing up some storage space.

The photo wasn't saved either, except in the screen shot I took for your amusement and mine:

I'm looking for a technical explanation of what happened and how Apple plans, or how anyone would plan, to prevent the loss of future information in similar use cases.

Photo Booth-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Sep 5, 2012 7:41 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 6, 2012 7:45 AM in response to Mae Ann Rehrer

This is a customer forum, so you're not likely going to receive an official Apple answer here.

As for the technical details of what might have happened here, the source code to the tools you're working with is not available; nobody can easily see what the tools are doing here (and doing right or wrong), other than the folks working at Apple.

The pragmatic answer is the obvious one of course. That running out of disk space causes various activities to fail and sometimes in unpredictable ways.

As for your options here, you can free up some disk space, or acquire and install a bigger disk.

I'd likely verify the disk structure with Disk Utility, either running online or (if the online version calls for this) booting from the 10.6 installation DVD and using Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.

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