Startup Disk Space

Your startup drive is your hard drive. You should maintain enough empty space at all times in order for the drive to be able to read and write to it without problems - at an absolute minimum, it should be at least 10 - 15 GB, but problems can arise before that depending on your usage pattern. Usual space hogging files are movies, videos, photos, and music. If you edit videos a lot, the recommended minimum empty space is at least as many GB as your files in your current project - my last one hour HD project amassed 150 GB of files while I was working on it, so I keep at least 250 GB empty at all times.

I'd suggest moving your space hogging files to an external drive to gain some space. Other than that, I would not rely on Clean my Mac or any other "cleaning" utility; they are not necessary and usually cause problems.

To find out what is occupying space on your drive, open a Finder window in column view and simply click on the folders listed on the left and control click on a folder: it will bring up a get info window which will tell you how much space (GB) are being used.

First, if you want to clean your Mac, get rid of "CleanMyMac."

When you next have the problem, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.

Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar.

Scroll back in the log to the time you noted above. Select any messages timestamped from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first. Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).

When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.

Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.