One single PDF taking up space continuously upon editing

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Level 1

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One single PDF taking up space continuously upon editing

Hi, not sure if anyone has encountered this. I have one large PDF file that is 1.2 gb big. It's a textbook pdf so hence the size. It was functioning well until I started reading it on my macbook air preview and using preview to highlight and to annotate within the PDF itself. I know preview periodically save different versions of it as I edit this large PDF file; however, I notice my disk space shrinking considerably more and more as I continue to highlight and annotate on this file (I know I have well over 50 gb of space before I started doing this highlighting and annotation). My disk space just shrunk to dangerously low levels this morning. I managed to transfer some of my other files to an external drive and manage to get back 25 Gb of space right away. Since then all I have been doing is reading this PDF and highlighting and annotating, and my disk space just shrunk to only 8 gb once again. Please help!

I bought my macbook air late last year brand new and had upgraded it to 512 gb of disk space. I have never had an issue with disk space until I started annotating and highlight this huge PDF file. How can I reclaim my space????!!

Thanks all in advance.

D

MacBook Air, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Jul 5, 2013 1:02 PM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,891 points

Jul 5, 2013 2:12 PM in response to Dermography

If your theory about the problem is correct, you should delete past versions of the file:

OS X Mountain Lion: View and restore past versions of documents

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Answer 2

Dermography Author

Level 1

0 points

Jul 5, 2013 3:10 PM in response to Linc Davis

Wow, thanks so much. I managed to reclaim a whopping 20 GBs of space just by doing that!

Just a follow up question, this PDF from which I reclaimed 20 GBs of space is actually a backup copy of the original PDF that I have. The original PDF is of course equally huge in file size, and that is the one I initially started highlighting and annotating on. However, a couple of days ago, somehow preview didn't save my edits correctly and corrupted my file and since then I have not been able to open this corrupted PDF file at all (Preview, adobe pro, skim...none of them can open this file anymore). I tried those commericial PDF repair softwares and none of them could fix it and hence I had to restore and use a backup copy of it.

I suspect that there's another 20-30Gbs of space sucked in via the version feature that is attributed to this corrupted original PDF. However, since I can't open it, I can't use the above method to delete all previous versions of it. Any thoughts in terms of how I can reclaim the spaces occupied by the versions of this corrupted original PDF file? Does deleting this corrupted file automatically delete all the previous versions of it?

Thanks in advance for all your help!

D

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