Memory loss on trash clearance

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Level 1

9 points

Memory loss on trash clearance

I had a large ( 23Gb ) bootcamp image (Winclone) in a folder in the root directory and moved it to trash. I tried secure empty trash and it kept aborting giving reasons for applications in use, caches in use. These were unique to bootcamp so I know it was not OSX. After a frustrating 10mins I gave up with secure trash empty and just used trash empty. The deletion was successful however I only realised 12Gb of additional disc space not the 23Gb I was expecting. I have looked for other trash repositories and not found any. I am assuming this loss may be due to the way I deleted the trash, what is the best way of recovering this unavailable space? Any suggestion would be most welcome

Mac Book Pro Retina late 2012, OSX 10.5.9

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3), Low data transfer rates

Posted on Jul 17, 2015 11:39 AM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

685,293 points

Jul 18, 2015 8:50 AM in response to Crag_rat

Where are you looking to see the drive space available as empty?

Try re-indexing Spotlight.

Spotlight – Re-index

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Answer 2

Crag_rat Author

Level 1

9 points

Jul 18, 2015 9:02 AM in response to Eric Root

Hi Eric,

I have looked in the space available summaries given in Finder and the data I quoted is from Finder,I will reindex spotlight as suggested. My main thought has been that I used in secure trash empty and I understand the data remains so I am probably not seeing fill recovery since most of the files will still be intact.

Thanks

Brian

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