Not Sure

[Mrs H]

Hi,
I have had 13" apple mac book pro for last couple of years with no problems at all but recently it has been saying that my idisk is nearly full when I try to upload photos. It is mostly used for emails/uploading family pet photos and videos/ facebook. A friend said I should download the new itunes as then i would get extra space to store photo's music etc. I tried to download but I only had 157mb and you need at least 250mb. I followed advise to delete old messages/photo's/movies/files etc but It didn't make much difference.

Frustrated by lack of space I searched online and followed advise to quit processes that I didn't need. I looked in activity monitor and then in a list of processes, I saw 'parent controls' and thought this would be a good one to loose as it wasn't really needed. I hoped i would start to free up some space but to my horror everything along the bottom of my Mac just completely
disappeared...finder, applications,ical,iphoto,imovie,address,text edit, garage band etc, etc., all gone! The picure of a disk saying itunes 10 on the top right also disappeared. All I am left with is the file along the top and although I can still move the arrow about nothing happens when I try to click on file. I have done nothing more since than try to click of file or edit so I could undo but nothing comes down of happens.

What have I done?
Did I miss read 'parent control' or click on something else by accident? It only said are you sure you want to 'quit' just like it would to empty the trash.
Is there anyway to sort it out?
What would have happened to all the Photos I had stored on the Iphoto? Is there anyway to get them back?

I was going to ask 'just ask.com' but they want £33 just to look at my question and I would rather get free advise first.

Any help or advise as to who can help gratefully received.

Mrs H

 

[Giaguara]

Hi Mrs. H,

Welcome and sorry for some delays here - I hope it's not too late to help you.

It's probably your hard drive that's full (iDisk is on .Mac server, not on your local system).
Quitting programs you are not using frees only RAM, not the hard drive space.
If you restart the Mac, you'll "gain" a tiny bit of empty space on the system as the cache files get overwritten (the files and space the system uses for working with the programs while you run the Mac. When you work with large files, the temp/cache files can grow to several GB in size), so that could be one thing to do for a start, but nowhere enough.

A Mac runs smoothly and the system heals itself when it has 15 % of its hard drive space free. So if you have 100 GB hard drive, that would make it 15 GB free, 200 GB -> 30 GB and so on. If there is much less space, the programs don't have enough space to work properly and to work - it would be the same as trying to do a yoga class for 20 in an apartment where you can only clean after doing 4 hours of Tetris to get any floor space available for cleaning. So even in the analog equivalent you'll need some space, otherwise you can't vacuum or do yoga or anything you'd like to use the space for.

Having quit Parental Controls process from Activity Monitor should not do harm.
The application or the process is still on your Mac, and it'll run again when needed. Perhaps the process is bound to Finder, in the sense that if you quit it it will also interfere and interrupt Finder from working - the dock going berserk would fit that symptom.
So after restarting your Mac, the processes and apps should still work as they are intended to.

Back to clearing some space on your hard drive. First - empty the Trash. (click from the Trash icon on the dock,opposite end of Finder) It'll clear what you have there. When you trash items, they go to Trash, but it doesn't get emptied until you empty it. So if you delete 50 GB of items in a year, but didn't empty the Trash, there's 50 GB of your hard drive still used for that trash.

After doing that, it'll be good to take an inventory of your system. How big is the hard drive? How much of it is free? You can use Finder for finding that out.
After that, what big files do you have that you don't need? Where is your space gone?
Perhaps there is a lot of content in your Downloads folder? If you downloaded applications, after installing the applications you don't need those installer files in your Downloads folder longer. If you'll later need to install an application later, there will probably be a newer app installer for it anyway.
Also are there any large other items that you don't need any more, or need less regularly? Any movies you've seen and don't need on your hard drive? Any large applications you don't use any more?

You'll probably benefit of a larger hard drive eventually. Another thing you could do is to use an external hard drive for storing some of your files - the ones you don't need a daily access to. That should help you clear more space on your hard drive. Most likely as soon as we've cleared enough space there (and maybe have run a system maintenance tool like Yasu or OnyX), the problems you described should have disappeared.

 

[Satcomer]

Also open iPhoto and empty the Trash that is in that. Apple's iPhoto has a separate Trash can from the operating system.

Plus think about moving you iTunes Library to an external (see here to move the iTunes Library). This will save a lot of room.