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Mantravine Author

Level 1

8 points

trouble removing fcpx 10.2.1 files from mac

hello,

i am using the FCPX 10.2.1

I am editing a series of short videos which comprise of events and projects.

The raw video files are sourced from an sd card.

The editing of the files are done through the macintosh hard drive.

To delete a project and relevant event file, I right click on the item and choose move to trash. Strangely enough instead of freeing up space on my hard drive it is actually eating up space on my hard drive. Very strange and i am now down to having 3GB of hard drive space left.

I can't find the files in the trash.

I noticed under library properties there is an item called Backups and they are going to the "final cut backups" folder. Is there any chance that the deleted files are going into here and should i be deleting the files from here?

Does anyone know where the deleted files are going and how can i delete them permanently so i can free up space on my hard drive.

Would appreciate anyone's help if possible. Thank you.

iMac (21.5-inch Mid 2011), OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Jul 14, 2015 3:25 AM

21 replies

Oct 5, 2015 3:33 AM in response to Mantravine

These are backups of your libraries, NOT of your media!

The location of backups can be set in FCP X. Select the library, open the Inspector and click on Modify Settings.

To use a backup of one library, select it, and go to File->Open Library...->From Backup and then choose the time and date of the backup you want.

You can delete older backups that you don't think you will need; just do it manually in the Finder. This will not affect your library.

Deleting generated files is never a problem. The keyword is "generated". They can always be regenerated. This includes optimized, proxy media, and render files. They tend to occupy a lot of space, so it is a good idea to delete them if you are low on space or if you are going to archive your library because, for instance, you just finished working on that production.

If you delete your original media files, then you are on your own.

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Oct 5, 2015 4:31 AM in response to Mantravine

Just to add a comment to Luis' info, the backup libraries take up very little space (which you can see by right clicking> one of them>Get Info). At some point (around 25) FCP starts dropping the earliest of the versions – so it is self-limiting. FWIW, I can't recall whether I've ever had reason to manually deleted a backup – although, as Luis said, it's easily done.

Russ

Mantravine Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 5, 2015 9:46 PM in response to Luis Sequeira1

thank you.

Mantravine Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 5, 2015 11:50 PM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Hello,

Thought i would just share that i found the backups i was looking for. So i actually tried all the files in the final cut backups folder but none of them were able to find the older projects that i had deleted.

Then i tried to open some of the other files as highlighted before and these files were backups of deleted projects that i was looking for (highlighted icon in image below)

There are 5 of these files (purple icon files) and i'm wondering when do these get created and whether it's important to delete these files if not necessary.

Please let me know if you are aware of the above files.

Mantravine Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 6, 2015 1:37 AM in response to Mantravine

also i noticed every time i clicked one of the purple icons from the previous message

a) the size of the file changed tremendously (increased)

b) an extra purple icon file was created

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Oct 6, 2015 5:23 AM in response to Mantravine

When you double-click a backup library (the purple icons) FCP copies it to the location of the original library. The size of the new library reflects hard links to the media. It's actually NOT taking up tremendous amounts of space. You can verify this by opening multiple backups and noting the very modest impact on your HD's available storage space.

Russ

edit: NOT inserted

trouble removing fcpx 10.2.1 files from mac