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

[alreed]

hi forum,

I'm wondering if anyone can help?

I have an iBook with a small, but sufficient hard drive of 28GB (I use external hard drives when I'm recording in Cubase or working with big files).

The problem is, even though my applications and iTunes(under User) only take up 10GB, since everything else is on the external hard drives, my hard drive says I'm using 27GB in total. That's 17GB unaccounted for! It was ok when it was 3-4GB, but 17 seems a bit much. Do I need to reinstall, or is it something wrong with my systems folder?

Any help would be REALLY appreciated, I've had this problem for the past year now!

Thanks...

[mathologie]

hi forum,

I'm wondering if anyone can help?

I have an iBook with a small, but sufficient hard drive of 28GB (I use external hard drives when I'm recording in Cubase or working with big files).

The problem is, even though my applications and iTunes(under User) only take up 10GB, since everything else is on the external hard drives, my hard drive says I'm using 27GB in total. That's 17GB unaccounted for! It was ok when it was 3-4GB, but 17 seems a bit much. Do I need to reinstall, or is it something wrong with my systems folder?

Any help would be REALLY appreciated, I've had this problem for the past year now!

Thanks...

what is the ibook and what is the system Mac Os 9 Or 10.?
also you have to look at the size of the different subFolders in the system folder and then only one can think to do a diagnosis

[kayj_prod]

what is the ibook and what is the system Mac Os 9 Or 10.?

I agree with Mathologie; we need a little more information. If on OSX, there is a chance that your log files in your system folder are the culprits. My MBP seems to have an issue with making huge log files which I periodically clear out. (I also found I had 2Gb of Podcasts recently, which surprised me!)

Let us know a little more information and we will try to help. You could start by going through your folders (on all user accounts) and seeing which are especially bigger than you might expect.

Keith

[qusp74]

Could be fragmentation and remnants of old files, but it's far more likely to be just the scratch disk space needed for your system and applications to work. Have you upgraded your ram recently? Ram typically needs roughly 3 times the amount of harddisk space spare as a swap file. 1gb ram=3gb space needed 3gb=9gb needed. BUT thats just for the system to operate efficiently so it will usually allow you to right to it...up to a point.

How about vst plugs etc.? where are you keeping them? they could be in the library folder that is in the root level of your harddrive, rather than the one in your user directory and some of those babies are have HUGE sample sets to make them work. Also... is this number 27gb consistent or does it change during operation? Some applications need their own scratch space to work... Photoshop is a major culprit in this department.

So yes some more info would help us to nail this problem down for you.

[Rhsilverberg]

hi forum,

I'm wondering if anyone can help?

I have an iBook with a small, but sufficient hard drive of 28GB (I use external hard drives when I'm recording in Cubase or working with big files).

The problem is, even though my applications and iTunes(under User) only take up 10GB, since everything else is on the external hard drives, my hard drive says I'm using 27GB in total. That's 17GB unaccounted for! It was ok when it was 3-4GB, but 17 seems a bit much. Do I need to reinstall, or is it something wrong with my systems folder?

Any help would be REALLY appreciated, I've had this problem for the past year now!

Thanks...

The other day at my day job, I was astonished to be working in PhotoShop only to find that I could not save a file because of a memory error. Knowing all about Scratch Disks, etc. from both music and graphics work, I took a look at the system drive. It showed an available amount of disk space at less than 1 Megabyte. What I found was a single file that was over 9 Gigs! It was a Microsoft Office Database file. If you're using Microsoft Office, apparently this file can get huge.

HTH.

Roger

[ArchivalAudio]

What
tool programs do you use?

Please try
Applejack
http://applejack.sourceforge.net/

opensource

After installing it

use it in single user mode
by restarting and holding down [apple] [S]

use the deep cleaning mode
by typing
applejack AUTO restart

this will deep clean your temp files
and also help
rewrite your permissions
(better IMHO then apple's disk utility)

it will help out

I alway reccomend this faor all my mac friends

I like it

it may help
ArchivalAudio
aka
-- Ian

[lepetitmartien]

First max your ram if it isn't the case already, a laptop is more efficient with as much ram as it can host. (more ram = less swap in fact)

You must have caches and temp fils bloating space. Regular OnyX or Applejack use can help keep thing tidy and unbloated. Note that Applejack still doesn't work in Leopard AFAIK.

Check if you don't have loads of printer drivers, localisation files of software bloating space. Printer direvers are installed by default by OS X save if you tell it not so… There are utilities to remove unwanted languages files. All this can free more than a GB.

Mind that drives are getting cheaper…

[qusp74]

I stand corrected, don't know what I was thinking there with the swap sizes, I guess it goes back to when I didn't have enough ram to hold the huge photoshop files that I was running. Photoshop uses ram in A different way to audio apps from what you say lepetitmartien glad to know that.. If you open a 10000x10000 pixel(100megapixel) file in photoshop which I have just done on my machine; a G5 with 4gb of ram you gat a file that is 286mb but has a scratch file of over 900mb, now Photoshop has always been a memory hog and has also always handled memory in a different way to OSX but its good to know that Logic or DAW's don't pull the same trick.

cheers

[alreed]

Thanks,

A friend tried applejack recently on it and it didn't seem to free up any more space than was available before we did it. Having said that, there's even less available memory than there was at that time.

Should I try it again, or will rebooting help? I have 2 external hard drives already ...it's true, they're cheap, but it's a pain that now all I have on my internal drive is my iTunes, and even with that i keep having to delete stuff if i don't want my "start-up disk" to be "almost full" . The iBook's days are numbered it would seem, pity coz I don't really want to buy a new computer just yet.... does this sort of thing happen with age perhaps? I've had it since March, 2005.

Cheers... any tips welcome!

[alreed]

OK... some more info coming up....

processor: 1.2 GHz PowerPC G4
memory: 768 MB DDR SDRAM

And the internal hard drive is 27.82 GB apparently. I'm presently using 26.84 (28,816,822,272 bytes), though to be honest, having gone through all my applications, folders etc, I'm only using just over 10GB!

Thanks already for that stuff about scratch disks... I have got microsoft office on this and have been using it quite heavily recently. How do I sort that out then, if that is the problem - access and delete those files??

Cheers,
Alex

Oh, sorry forgot to say it's OSX 10.4.11

....which big cat is that anyway, I get them all confused

[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

[deaconblue]

If you open your hard drive in list mode (detailed view), click on the edit menu, select "View Options", make sure that the check box for "Calculate All Sizes" is enabled. Then look at the folders listed. It will show you the relative size of all folders in the hard drive. If you then use the disclosure triangles, you will see what all the sub-folder sizes are as well. You can then sort by size (click on the "Size" column header at the top of the window) and you should be able to begin to isolate where your large file/folder size is hiding.

If I look at my hard drive, the Applications folder is about 10.35GB, but my library folder (where all my sounds, plug ins, Application Support files, etc., are stored) is 101.1GB. If you have a few plug ins installed, depending on what they are, they can take up quite a bit of room. By comparison, my System folder is only 3.5 GB in size.

Hope this helps narrow it down a bit for you.

Peace.

[alreed]

If anyone's interested still, I solved it... as a 'super-user'. If anyone else ever has this problem then read this:

I downloaded WhatSize, then...

1. Launched Terminal and typed sudo followed by a space.
2. Ctrl clicked on the freshly installed WhatSize application, and chose Show Package Contents.
3. Opened the Contents/MacOS folder within, and found the WhatSize unix executable file.
4. Dragged that file onto the Terminal window, and from within that window, pressed enter.
5. Entered admin password.

This way I could open WhatSize as usual, but with superuser privileges and could read every directory on the hard drive I asked it to measure.

WhatSize is freeware for up to 20GB of memory b4 you have to pay for a small license fee - so its good to know where to look - for me it was the Systems folder. My problem was 8GB of Trashes under Volumes in there. Because I'd been running Cubase through my external drive, the System had somehow still kept the trashes on the internal drive...

Thanks to everyone for all the advice though!

[lepetitmartien]

My problem was 8GB of Trashes under Volumes in there. Because I'd been running Cubase through my external drive, the System had somehow still kept the trashes on the internal drive...

Strange, trashes are disk specific, you don't move the files to your system drive before deleting them…

I think you met some bug in Cubase and it did not trash poperly some temporary files along the way… AGood to know!

Which version of cubase have you used lately on which version(s) of the system? It may help others.

Thanks for coming back and light up our lantern, this is something new your cubase trash thing.