Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

scottct1

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 7, 2012
311
611
Connecticut USA
I am working on a project and it needs 100 GIG of space. I tried copying it to my Retina Macbook Pro and was told I did not have enough free space. I took a look and it says I have 84 gig free.

I went into my Movies Directory and removed all my old iMovie files. That directory itself was close to 100 GB in size.

After I did that I emptied the trash.

However if I try copying the 100 gig directory I need to use I am told I do not have enough space. If I click on my hard drive and select info it tells me I have 84 gig free.

I ran the Drive Utility and it didn't find anything. So how do I get the mac to realize it had this new free space? Is there a way to reindex or rescan the drive?
 

Shirasaki

macrumors P6
May 16, 2015
15,710
11,012
I am working on a project and it needs 100 GIG of space. I tried copying it to my Retina Macbook Pro and was told I did not have enough free space. I took a look and it says I have 84 gig free.

I went into my Movies Directory and removed all my old iMovie files. That directory itself was close to 100 GB in size.

After I did that I emptied the trash.

However if I try copying the 100 gig directory I need to use I am told I do not have enough space. If I click on my hard drive and select info it tells me I have 84 gig free.

I ran the Drive Utility and it didn't find anything. So how do I get the mac to realize it had this new free space? Is there a way to reindex or rescan the drive?
You can rescan it under recovery partition. :)
 

scottct1

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 7, 2012
311
611
Connecticut USA
I booted into recovery mode (Command R) and ran the new El Capitan Disk Utility.

It scans fine with no errors.

I rebooted again, when in and backed up my 50 gig "photos" from the photos directory, emptied the trash and now it shows it as 71.43 GB free, down from 84.78 GB free.

I have removed close to 200 GB from the drive and each time I do it, it shows LESS free space available.
 

scottct1

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 7, 2012
311
611
Connecticut USA
Well good news...

After leaving it alone for awhile. It is now showing available free space at 290.99 GB.

They must have some CRON job that updates free space every hour or so.
 

Shirasaki

macrumors P6
May 16, 2015
15,710
11,012
Well good news...

After leaving it alone for awhile. It is now showing available free space at 290.99 GB.

They must have some CRON job that updates free space every hour or so.
I think, that simply because OS X does such works in background, and the speed is not fast.

Therefore you need to wait extensively before knowing the latest result.

I tried deleting more than 5000 files using OS X, and I waited more than 2 hours to let it finish. In Windows, I only waited 10 minutes.
 

Ritsuka

Cancelled
Sep 3, 2006
1,464
968
If you have Time Machine enabled and you are on a portable mac it keeps a bunch of data until you make the backup.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.