Is FCP X eating my free space?

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Level 1

78 points

Is FCP X eating my free space?

I have noticed in the past that while working on a project sometimes my free space fluctuate wildy many tens of Gbytes suddenly appearing as available but then disappearing shortly thereafter. Today i went on a cleaning binge removing about 15 gbytes worth of media and render files which should have (and at first did) leaving me with at least 50 gbytes free then i looked at the space a little while later after quitting and i was back down to only ~35 gbytes free.

I did a little reserach and addition and found that i have about 35 gybtes unaccounted for on my main drive. i have done all the reccomended steps in the general forum for recovering missing disk space, repairing disk and permissions from the recovery partition (no significant errors, smart verified). i have even logged in a root and using drive mapping programs to see if there are more missing files i'm not counting and the only clue i have at this point is this ghost storage that occasionally shows up while working in FCP X.

Any advice or pointers as to what i can try next would be greatly appreciated and many points will be awarded to anyone can can offerr any help whatsoever, thanks!

Sys Info: 10.7.5 FCP 10.0.9 Mid 2009 13 inch MBP 4/250

Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Sep 15, 2013 5:19 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Luis Sequeira1

Level 9

64,460 points

Sep 16, 2013 1:42 AM in response to ubernaut

I don't have a definitive answer, but a few things come to mind.

Since you only have 4GB of RAM, it is very easy for your mac to start swapping to disk, as real RAM gets exhausted. Does restarting your mac free some space?

Also, try running OnyX and let it clear caches, etc.

One other thing: it has been reported a few times that having little hard drive space free somehow triggers situations where even that quickly goes.

I suggest using an external drive with plenty of space, rather than storing your material in the system drive (this is not just my recommendation, it is Apple's).

And upping your RAM to 8GB instead of 4GB should also help a lot with performance in FCP X.

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Answer 2

ubernaut Author

Level 1

78 points

Sep 16, 2013 9:11 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

I owe you five more points tried to mark you helpful and solved my problem but the second button disappeared. OnyX helped me identify that my startup volume still needed repair.

Now showing almost 70 Gbytes of free space!

🙂

So… for anyone else seeing this problem make sure when you run disk repair from your recovery volume that you run the repair on the volume NOT the drive.

I guess the moral of the story is never underestimate my capacity for ineptitude.

Thanks again Luis i was really starting to worry a bit there at this point.

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