Full hard drive messages wile having plenty of space.

Question

Level 1

8 points

Full hard drive messages wile having plenty of space.

Hi everbody,

Im using a 2012 MacMini with 16GB RAM and the stock 500GB HDD.

I don't know what to do. My MacMini gives me error messages all the time saying that my HDD Memory is Full - but it isn't.

I already emptied the bin. I transferred GB´s of Videos onto an external HDD. The Memory sometimes gets more and than is shrinks without having done anything.

Today I had 1,76GB free memory and wile watching a Video the same "missing HDD space" message showed up.

Also the amounts vary a lot. Yesterday it showed me 210GB of Videos (green)- today after transferring not even 10GB of videos it now says i just got 12GB left and the difference is now on the (yellow) colored data.

Can someone please help me... 😟

Hope i explained myself good enough.

Many thx in advance!

Mac mini, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Oct 2, 2016 3:02 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

685,293 points

Oct 3, 2016 5:05 AM in response to noob85

Try re-indexing Spotlight.

Spotlight – Re-index

Drive space – minimum free required

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Answer 2

trevoz

Level 4

1,990 points

Oct 3, 2016 5:05 AM in response to noob85

Open a Terminal window and type:

df -h

and then paste the output here.

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Answer 3

noob85 Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 3, 2016 2:30 AM in response to trevoz

df -hLast login: Mon Oct 3 10:53:27 on console

......-Mac-mini:~ ......... df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on

/dev/disk0s2 325Gi 324Gi 1.7Gi 100% 84886806 436486 99% /

devfs 178Ki 178Ki 0Bi 100% 616 0 100% /dev

/dev/disk0s4 139Gi 125Gi 14Gi 90% 32786501 3744179 90% /Volumes/Privat

map -hosts 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /net

map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /home

......-Mac-mini:~ .........

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Answer 4

noob85 Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 3, 2016 2:45 AM in response to Eric Root

Hi Eric, I did the re-indexing and the occupancy-bars of the HDD went all to (yellow). After a wile they started reordering themselves, but the actual amount of free Space hasn't change. Even though it made an important change to me because its not the green bar (videos) thats occupying 3/4 of the space anymore. Now its (yellow) which makes mote sense because i moved most of the Videos to get more space. Still don't understand what all that (yellow) bar should be... The main amount of stuff i saved on my mac are videos and pictures... investigation has not yet finished 😉

Many many thx for that good advice/information of `how to´ reorder the memory-bars 😀

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Answer 5

trevoz

Level 4

1,990 points

Oct 3, 2016 3:09 AM in response to noob85

Here's the problem:

/dev/disk0s2 325Gi 324Gi 1.7Gi 100% 84886806 436486 99% /

You have used 99% of the inodes (data structure in the filesystem that records information about the file). This is why you are getting the low disk space warning.

Do you have lots of small files in your Documents folder maybe?

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Answer 6

Oct 3, 2016 4:01 AM in response to trevoz

Not just the inodes. The system reports just over 1GB of free space.

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Answer 7

noob85 Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 3, 2016 5:13 AM in response to trevoz

The only Files i have are Videos from my GoPro/Sony and my DSLR. Maybe a total of 10 downloaded Musik files and 5 Apps/Programs. Thats it. Im actually just using the Mac for Video editing, Research on the web and hear Youtube music. All my other Stuff i got on an external HDD.

Last week when all these Problems started i went to the Master HDD and added up all the GB´s in the 4 Folders i have. The total amount of GB´s was much less than the reported amount shown in the HDD info window on 'about this Mac'.

That´s why I think there is some kind of Bug. I will do this calculation again as soon as im Home to see if something has changes since i did the re-indexing.

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Answer 8

trevoz

Level 4

1,990 points

Oct 3, 2016 5:23 AM in response to noob85

It really does seem that you are running out of disk space. Have you emptied the trash lately?

To find where all the space has gone, you can use this command in a Terminal window:

cd /

du -h -d1

It will list every top level folder and show how much space it is using. You can then check those folders which are using the most.

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Answer 9

Oct 3, 2016 5:37 AM in response to noob85

noob85 wrote:

The only Files i have are Videos from my GoPro/Sony and my DSLR. Maybe a total of 10 downloaded Musik files and 5 Apps/Programs. Thats it.

Video files take a huge amount of space. You are not saying how much space they take, but seem to assume it is not much. Open a Finder window and do View->Show Status Bar. What does it say at the bottom of the window regarding available space?

I may be wrong, but I am inclined to believe that you are indeed running low on disk space.

The Terminal commands that you ran concur with this notion.

You said you emptied the trash before, but just to make sure, take a look at it and make sure it is empty: