Disk Full message - Zero bytes available

Sorry if this sounds too basic, but to regain space, you have to empty the trash.

If you already did this and did not gain free space, then there's something else that's a fault. Restart your Mac. Go to the Apple menu and select About This Mac, then select the Storage tab. Does what it shows look reasonable based on your usage? If not, you need to force Spotlight to re index your drive.

1. From the Apple () menu, choose System Preferences.
2. Click Spotlight.
3. Click the Privacy tab.
4. Drag a folder or an entire volume (your hard drive) to the list.
5. If prompted for confirmation, click OK.
6. Remove the item or volume you just added to the list by clicking it and then clicking the minus ("-") button.
7. Close Spotlight preferences.

Using CDs or even DVDs now a days is not an effective method. You should purchase an external hard drive (or two) and use it to off-load some of your files, like your photo Library and to always have a backup of all your files.

Here are some general tips to keep your Mac's hard drive trim and slim as possible

You should never, EVER let a computer hard drive get completely full, EVER!

With Macs and OS X, you shouldn't let the hard drive get below 15 GBs or less of free data space.

If it does, it's time for some hard drive housecleaning.

Follow some of my tips for cleaning out, deleting and archiving data from your Mac's internal hard drive.

Have you emptied your Mac's Trash icon in the Dock?

If you use iPhoto or Aperture, both have its own trash that needs to be emptied, also.

If you store images in other locations other than iPhoto, then you will have to weed through these to determine what to archive and what to delete.

If you are an iMovie/ Final Cut user, both apps have their own individual Trash location that needs to be emptied, too!

If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!

Delete any old or no longer needed emails and/or archive to disc, flash drives or external hard drive, older emails you want to save.

Look through your other Mailboxes and other Mail categories to see If there is other mail you can archive and/or delete.

STAY AWAY FROM DELETING ANY FILES FROM OS X SYSTEM FOLDER!

Look through your Documents folder and delete any type of old useless type files like "Read Me" type files.

Again, archive to disc, flash drives, ext. hard drives or delete any old documents you no longer use or immediately need.

Look in your Applications folder, if you have applications you haven't used in a long time, if the app doesn't have a dedicated uninstaller, then you can simply drag it into the OS X Trash icon. IF the application has an uninstaller app, then use it to completely delete the app from your Mac.

To find other large files, download an app called Omni Disk Sweeper.

http://www.omnigroup.com/more

Also, Find Any File

http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/

Typically, iTunes and iPhoto libraries are the biggest users of HD space.

move these files/data off of your internal drive to the external hard drive and deleted off of the internal hard drive.

If you have any other large folders of personal data or projects, these should be archived or moved, also, to the optical discs, flash drives or external hard drive and then either archived to disc and/or deleted off your internal hard drive.

Moving iTunes library

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449

Moving iPhoto library

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2506

Moving iMovie projects folder

http://support.apple.com/kb/ph2289

A disclaimer,

Things to consider before moving your iPhoto Library Folder to a new or external location like an external hard drive.

If you make movies on any iDevices using iMovie for iOS,, then transfer the video footage, the IOS version of iMovie saves the footage as a movie file in IPhoto for IOS and will automatically get transferred to iPhoto for the Mac when you upload the video from your iDevice.

Newer versions of iMovie will work and link those video files found in your iPhoto Library on your Mac, but those links can be lost if you move your iPhoto library and you will not be able to relink that video afterwards as the current versions of iMovie seem to not have a relink option for the video portion of the files (ironically, current versions of iMovie HAVE the ability to re-link the audio files from the video footage, though (The inability to re-link the video files could be a possible bug or oversight in current versions iMovie).

The lost video links show up as "blacked-out" video blocks with no content.

Before moving the iPhoto Library

If you make movies with iMovie using iPad or iPhone video then 'Consolidate' the files before you finish. This will gather (albeit by duplicating) all the relevant files in the project in one place. After consolidating/duplicating all of the audio and video footage to a seperate, independent location,it should be safe to move your iPhoto library.

The potential way to circumvent this issues maybe to try and import iPad and iPhoto video directly into iMovie which would be another solution.

Good Luck!

Rysz wrote:

Using CDs or even DVDs now a days is not an effective method. You should purchase an external hard drive (or two) and use it to off-load some of your files, like your photo Library and to always have a backup of all your files.

Not true.

For long term archiving of very important data like photos, images, important documents, slow burned( burning data disk at slow burning speeds of 2-8x burn speed ) good quality, named brand optical discs are a very good option. Stored carefully locally and off-site, optical discs should last, at least, 10-15 years and perhaps up to 25 years before the data on those discs needs to be duplicated on some other new and more permarent digital archival medium.

The quality of hard drives today is such that the data on those drives would need to be duplicated to new hard drives or some other data storage medium between every 5-10 years. Maybe less because of the diminished quality of today's hard drives that could fail within 5 years, now.

USB style stick type Flash drives are no option for long term data storage, at all.

And no one is sure of data longevity on the current crop of Solid State (Flash memory) style drives, either.

AND, I would not trust any long term data storage to cloud-based, off-site server services at this early stage, either.

Optical media would seem to be the only long term data storage media still left to preserve data for a much longer period of time.

Currently, I am not aware of any other new, long term storage media that is available or even being developed at this time for use as a long-term, local archival solution for digital data.

I don't think this user case is about multi-decade archiving. DVDs are no longer practical for normal-use backups because they have such diminutive capacity (and are also time-consuming to make). To archive my Photos Library, as an example, I would need to burn 20 DVDs. My iTunes Library would require almost 200 DVDs.

For iTunes stuff, it wouldn't be practical if you have a lot of purchased music, movies, books, etc. from the iTunes Store that you could redownload.

If you still have commercial or home made CDs/DVDs of music and movies, it would probably be easier to just reimport these as well, if a user ended up losing all their iTunes library of media.

So, for most imported and downloaded content, I agree that CDs/DVDs for long term archiving may not be practical in that circumstance.

For homemade video or semi-pro/professional videos, you bet, burning these to DVDs for both distribution and archival purposes is a very good idea.

Same for any type of important projects that I want to keep for a long time...they go straight to a DVD archive.

As far as photos and images go, I guarantee you that someday, sometime that a digital storage medium will either fail or become corrupt and you maybe without , at the very least, a recent backup of those photos/images. And do you really want to have to always remember to backup your photos library to preserve these precious memories, all of the time on a regular basis? I sure don't.

Most people never print their camera images out. Most stay in the computer and most users do not think to backup, at least, their photos/images until it is too late.

I have many years of DVDs of Photos on them. I want to keep those images for a long as the optical medium can hang onto them until I have to make another copy of these archived images at some point (for me, some of my archived photo discs are now over 10 years old. Probably time for me to check these to make sure the images are still viable and visible on the discs and not corrupt.)

The only long term preservation of photo images is optical media.

If I were you and you cherish your digital images and want to have them around for a long time, I would get cracking making archival DVDs of all of your important images.

You do do not have to archive your images in a single session. The sooner you start burning these to optical media, the sooner all of your images will be stored on more permanent data storage and you won't have to worry so much about losing any images you have amassed.

The average computer users think whatever they put onto a computer is going to last forever. This is definitely NOT the case.

Photos are on the computer are NOT really photos at all, but are still only "digital images".

A Photo or Photograph is a physical image on paper or photographic paper of special photographic paper.

Photographs are physical objects. An object with an image on it that we can physical hold on our hands and look at and easily share and pass around for others to look at and easily save like in photo albums/catalogues/storage boxes/shoe boxes, etc.

If printed out well photos can last for many, many years.

True, storing a large amount of images in a computer means no clutter and you can amass a rather large library of images that can be easily retrieved, edited and distributed.

For this very reason, digital images need to be treated differently if computer users expect to have their digital image libraries to last just as long.