Huge Sparseimage File

P

pillowparade

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Forgive me for creating a new thread when I see that others have talked about this issue before, but I have read the posts and I still do not understand what to do.
I have 74 GB on my hd, and last week, there was 15 gb free. The more I try to free up space, the less space I have. I accidentally deleted my iTunes library and in my attempts to restore it, I have less and less space. Even though I deleted a 12 gb duplicate iTunes folder and emptied the trash, nothing changes. I am down to 2 gb free with 72 gb mysteriously tied up.
I found in Disk Utility X that a 56.67 GB sparseimage file is eating up all the space, but I cannot for the life of me free up enough space so that I can turn off filevault.
How could this sparseimage be bigger than every other file on my computer? Please, please help me figure out how to free up this space.
 
That sparseimage contains the entire contents of your home directory -- that's what FileVault is, actually -- an encrypted disk image containing your home folder. If you have tons of music, movies and pictures (among other things) in your home folder, all that adds up to the size of the sparseimage.
 
But I don't understand how that can be. My hd only allows for 74 gb of space. How can the image of my files (at 56.67 gb) take up way more than half? I could never delete enough files to make room for that and turn off Filevault.
 
Ah, that's one of the big disadvantages to using file vault - where there's problems when the sparseimage gets too large. There's not enough free space on your internal hard drive to let the sparseimage take care of itself, and not enough space for you to do anything manually.
You will need to do that with an external hard drive. Do you have a hard drive that you use to backup your internal drive now?
 
I haven't backed up in a few years because my sister took the equipment to college. But when I retrieve it and plug it in, the external hard drive will act as an extension and give me more space to turn off filevault?
 
No, that will not help. You'll still have the same amount of free space on your boot drive. I would restore the system to your external drive. (Assuming that you have plenty of space on the external drive). You can then boot to your external drive, and turn off filevault. Once you have done that, you can erase your internal drive, and restore back.

This process will probably lose everything that you have backed up now, on that external drive.
Better to have your own dedicated back up drive, anyway. You can find external hard drives for $70 to $100, giving you as much as 500GB of storage.
 
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