Systems Folder?, How to free up memory... Options

[makaala]

ifreemem is a great utility that doesn't require restart.
http://www.activata.co.uk/ifreemem/

[lepetitmartien]

I think som exploration of you hard drive should be done. Search for heavy invisible files (there's the options, anything bigger than 1GB, invisible).

Applejack as OnyX will only free space that can be freed, by deleting cache files for example, these will be recreated at the next start up to accelerate things.

Maybe you could rebuild the spotlight database too (takes time to rebuild you're warned) but first things first, you should empty you drive of your files FIRST (I insist). Even if OS X is good at managing heavy loaded drives, you need to make free estate first to help clear things a little without risking something bad. Plus all the optimizations routines there's in OS X won't work if there's no free space to do them.

Now, did I say that drives were cheap?

[ArchivalAudio]

microsoft products like word (office)
are notorious for making many multiple temp files... and I believe that just continue to build up...

look at
http://www.opensourcemac.org/

and try
NeoOffice
instead of the MS office

its open source and designed for OSX not windoz

as I am no expert as lepetitmartien

like I said what tool programs do you use?

It doesn't sound like you can move any files around on your computer

you can alway search for "cache" and then trash all of the internet browser files manually either way you are going to have to delete files or clean cache files
before you have system failure and loose data that way


if you have not done so in your browser...

try that in OnyX it is a good cache cleaner...

I have had great success with TechTool
I like that you can start up with the techtool disc to completely optimize your system and defragment it very well


also I have and use OnyX it seems to be a tidy tool as well


how much music (like MP3's )do you have in itunes?

when you look in your Music file and [apple] [i] (get info) how big is that file?
dump music to a USB memory stick... you can get a small 2gb one for like $20
do you use iphoto?
burn some photos and music to CD or DVD
and free up space that way


OSX needs about 10gb of "freespace" to operate correctly



did you deep clean in applejack by using AUTO
all caps
?
that might help...
then restart
then use onyx
if you can install either

\



This post has been edited by ArchivalAudio: Wed 21 May 2008, 05:21

[lepetitmartien]

Note that a simple way to track some files is just to check in all libraries folder, the subfolders called "caches" and eventually "temp".

There are 3 Libraries folders:

~/Libraries/
~/system/Libraries/
~/users/user_name/Libraries/

All have a caches folder in. You can trash the content of the caches folders BUT you must restart after doing so.

For the Temp files and folder, you have to search.

To erase the virtual memory swap file, trust applejack under Tiger, but you'll have to do it by hand in Leopard (with onyx, set all files/folders visible, you'll see the VM folder, trash it, restart, set visibility to normal)

I still think that to search the big files only would be a good and simple idea.

The main commend to know in Applejack is:

applejack AUTO restart

It'll do its job and restart.

[alreed]

Um... ok I have a confesion to make, I went and got a macbook, well it was going cheap, but I'll try applejack one more time later on the iBook - it's still working fine anyway even with 1.75 GB free (a GB appeared for some reason... after it had a sleep maybe?) and I've got a couple of hard drives too.

So thanks for all the suggestions Archival Audio and lepetitmartien (tu dois etre francais avec un nom comme ca? allez, merci alors!)

[lepetitmartien]

mind that a mac under OS X has jobs to do at night, as planned in its cronjob file, these daily, weekly, monthly scripts are set to be done round 3-4 am. you can change the hours with Onyx to set one where the mac is up and running (and you may not work) it's important for these to be done every now and again.

There are other tools like for example the widget Maintidget that runs them at will, which may be more practical.

(I'm french and swiss, but this part of the forum speaks only English…

[manso]

Hello, sorry for my poor english. I'm writing from spain.

A friend of mine had the same problem and the solution was in "system preferences - security".
There's something called "filevault" , when actived it was doing an encripted copy of all the files in the hard drive, duplicating them.
Have a look if you have that activated.
Hope this helps.

[lepetitmartien]

Good idea ! (I never think about it, as it's part of the Apple stuff I never never use)

Now the worst, if you activated Filevault once then disabled it, there's still the encrypted file around. I remember there are some issues to remove it, got to check if needed…

[alreed]

Hello,

Thanks for the sugggestion manso. Just checked the security and the filevault's off. doh!

As far as I know it's always been off, but maybe it was switched on once and there are still encrypted filles lying around somewhere I can't find?

Supposing this is the case, where and how might I find them I wonder??

[lancet]

As far as I know it's always been off, but maybe it was switched on once and there are still encrypted filles lying around somewhere I can't find?

Supposing this is the case, where and how might I find them I wonder??

Don't waste your time.

File vault encrypts your entire user folder and only your user folder. It does so by creating an encrypted disk image of it.

Once it's turned off, it's off. If you only have one user home folder when you look in /Users then it's not the issue.

Sometimes when file vault goes bad you end up with a second user folder. This is because the encrypted image becomes unreadable and the OS is forced to make you a new default user folder.

This post has been edited by lancet: Sun 25 May 2008, 17:10