Why is my computer losing memory?

Mad Drama Teacher

I recently had 11 gigs left on my hard drive only to wake up one morning with only 500 megabytes.I'm running OS 10.3.9 on a Powerbook and have never reinstalled.What might be the cause?

paren

I recently had 11 gigs left on my hard drive only to wake up one morning with only 500 megabytes.

I'm running OS 10.3.9 on a Powerbook and have never reinstalled.

What might be the cause?

b/c your hard drive does not = RAM (memory)?

Mad Drama Teacher

Haha! I know that.

Basic question then: Why do I have 11 gigs of hard drive space one day and then only 500 megs the next? Where did it go?

BreakSelf

Haha! I know that.

Basic question then: Why do I have 11 gigs of hard drive space one day and then only 500 megs the next? Where did it go?

This just happened to my powerbook G4 as well! I went from 5 gigs down to 0K! I couldn't even save the Word document I was working on until I threw away a few mp3s. weird.

dollar_bin

Haha! I know that.

Basic question then: Why do I have 11 gigs of hard drive space one day and then only 500 megs the next? Where did it go?

Did you empty the trash? No, really, I can't explain missing 10.5 gigs, although OS X uses some virtual memory so if you haven't restarted your computer in a while, the system can eat up some HD space. Also, there's some periodic maintenence scripts you can run which can make your computer run better: http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html

johmbolaya

Defrag.

RAJ

I would say empty the trash.

I was down to 3 Gigs on my Powerbook emptied the trash and walla 8 gigs reappeared.

Zeke

If emptying the trash and a restart don't help, you might have an issue with temporary files. A lot of audio, video, and graphics editing programs will create large temporary files as a back-up if, for whatever reason, their architecture "senses" a crash. I don't know exact file types, names, folders, etc as they are program specific, but if you do use any large source editing tools like that, you might want to do a search on Google for something like "OS X Photoshop temp files". I've had issues specifically with Photoshop creating 5-600 meg temp files in the past. If you are using audio or video editing software, the temp files could be MUCH larger.

DB_Cooper

You probably already know this, but when you drop music into your iTunes, it creates a second copy of the file in the iTunes folder. I was trying to figure out why I was out of memory last year and realized I had 2 copies each of 14G of mp3s.

DJ_Enki

Haha! I know that.

Basic question then: Why do I have 11 gigs of hard drive space one day and then only 500 megs the next? Where did it go?

Also, there's some periodic maintenence scripts you can run which can make your computer run better:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html

Thank you for this. I'm pretty much in the situation they're describing (computer typically asleep or off during that window of time) and doubt those scripts have run very much. I ran them right before I left for work this morning and am hoping that they wll help alleviate some of the system slowdown I've been experiencing that's been getting worse of late.

Mr. Casual

You probably already know this, but when you drop music into your iTunes, it creates a second copy of the file in the iTunes folder. I was trying to figure out why I was out of memory last year and realized I had 2 copies each of 14G of mp3s.

Can you delete the ones in the folder without effecting the ones in itunes?

DB_Cooper

Yup. As long as they exist in your iTunes folder, you're all set.

HairyBelafonte

You probably already know this, but when you drop music into your iTunes, it creates a second copy of the file in the iTunes folder. I was trying to figure out why I was out of memory last year and realized I had 2 copies each of 14G of mp3s.

Can you delete the ones in the folder without effecting the ones in itunes?

so which ones can you delete? not in itunes, but ???


ps, while we are on the subject, where do mp3 files go when itunes says "original file cannot be found" I haven't taken anything out, whats up?

Mad Drama Teacher

"Where Did My Hard Drive Go?" + download that app they're talking about. I found two console files worth 10 gigs apiece. Now I'm back to 34 gigs of HD space!

Console Files discussion + iTunes

counterpoint

You probably already know this, but when you drop music into your iTunes, it creates a second copy of the file in the iTunes folder. I was trying to figure out why I was out of memory last year and realized I had 2 copies each of 14G of mp3s.

Can you delete the ones in the folder without effecting the ones in itunes?

I'm not sure if this is the same situation but what happened to me was that I deleted periodically from that 2nd copy. I think your mac/pc uses that to locate the original song file because then I would play my party shuffler and get errors with a grey "!" bubble telling me my file was missing. I dragged back the file from the trash into the itunes folder and it was cured. I too need more memory and a new battery on my ol' powerbook G4 (2001).

dollar_bin

Yup. As long as they exist in your iTunes folder, you're all set.

You have to be careful, though. This is the default behavior for iTunes but this can be shut off in the preferences. Before you delete other copies, make sure this is checked in your preferences:



Otherwise, you can get file not found errors. Also, in this dialog you can set where your iTunes files are stored.

DB_Cooper

so which ones can you delete? not in itunes, but ???

Let's say you have some mp3s you picked up somewhere besides iTunes. You have them in a folder on your desktop (or anywhere else, besides the iTunes folder). You import them into iTunes. They now exist both in the original folder on your desktop and in your iTiunes folder as two copies of the same mp3 file. You can now delete the original files on your desktop, because a copy exists in your iTunes folder that the file listing in your iTunes is linked to, and it won't affect iTunes at all.

The only hassle is with comps or songs featuring other artists???they'll be sorted into separate folders in your iTunes by artist name, which is a real bitch to sort out if you're trying to, say, burn a CD copy of the album. If you're into burning CDs, you might want to burn backup data discs of your albums, and copy the albums back onto your desktop when you want to burn a copy. It's also just a good practice to get into, in case your hard drive crashes. Nothing quite like the feeling of losing hundreds of albums in a single stroke.

Edit: What they said, too.

dollar_bin

"Where Did My Hard Drive Go?" + download that app they're talking about. I found two console files worth 10 gigs apiece. Now I'm back to 34 gigs of HD space!

Yeah, Disk Inventory X is great.

OrangeYoghurt

You downloaded some torrents?
Some worm got passed the firewall and is taking up space?
yer webcam recorded you while you were sleeping?