Erasing Free Space

Z

zoranb

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Im encountering space issues when erasing the HD free space! I get a popup message saying that i need to free up more space in order to get the job done. I cant remove any more data from the drive in order to make it more spacious for the free space erasing!
Is there a way i can hook up an external drive so that it will use that extra space?
 
Well have you ran any maintenance programs like Yasu or Onyx to clean the swap files and such?

Now OsX needs about 15% of a drive for temporary swap files. Having an external for the huge files of video and many pictures will save a lot of space. I urge to use the fastest ports for externals that your Mac can handel.
 
I use FW800 to connect my ext drive so thats the fastest i can use.

I was wondering if those temporary swap files that you said, could be located on the ext drive and not on the drive i want to erase free space so there wouldn't be any space issues!
 
No.

And keep at least 15 % of the hard drive space free, no matter what size volume you have on your boot volume.
 
I haven't yet met a single person who has been able to successfully use Disk Utility's 'Erase free space' function. It simply doesn't work. You invariably get a 'disk full' error. For any sensitive files you want to get rid of just use the Finder's 'Secure Empty Trash' function. For all the others, just trash them normally. There's no need to erase any free space or defragment anything. Leave that to the PC users.
 
Check this out guys, it appears that free space erasure will work, despite the message.
 

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I wouldn't use it. If you do, don't interrupt it even if it says you won't lose any data. If interrupted, the temporary file created during the process (this is what eats up the free space) may not get deleted, effectively resulting in you ending up with less free space than when you started. You then have to hunt down and delete this temp file manually. This has happened to more than one of my friends (yes, I have more than one friend… but I have to pay them monthly in advance) ;)
 
Frida I've used Disk Utility's free space with success. But I usually use that after deleting everything manually first, then running (DU from install disc..) the erase 7 or 35 times, and after that installing the OS to a new user.
 
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