How to completely delete trash on mac book pro?

M

michaelobrien

Registered
Please help: When I delete files on my mac book pro, i generally grab a file and put it in the trash and click on 'secure empty trash'..after that...i have a quick search for any duplicate files on my Hard drive and also delete those with secure empty trash, whether I delete photoshop files, jpegs or any other files, my hard drive space seems to go down fast when I creat a new file, but when I trash the file I never get the same amount of space back! For example, today I had 84.74GB of HD space and was doing some work and by the evening it was down to 84.15GB after editing images on photoshop...when I saw this, I deleted the larger files I created, and didnt get back much of the space I deleted!!! Am I doing something wrong??? Surely theres a way to get back this space back... ??? Thanks for any help. :)
 
My hard drive does the same thing. I have not figured it out either. I delete caches, etc.... with no affect. I recently maxed out my MacBook Pro memory to 8 Mb, thinking that the computer was using the hard drive as a memory reserve but putting in the maximum memory had no effect on the hard drive space that had been greatly varying (as much as 10 Giga Bytes) day to day (even though I have not made or place any large files on my hard drive).
 
You two don't really know how Unix (OS X is Unix) works do you? Just read the web site Mac OS X Hidden Files & Directories.

Plus is you Daily, Weekly and monthly running correctly? Open Terminal and type:
Code: 
ls -al /var/log/*.out
This will output when those log rotating scripts last ran. OS (unix) has these scripts to rotate/archive log files from growing huge over time. If the out times are not right manually run all those log arching scripts by open Terminal and typing:
Code: 
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
It will manually run those scripts that one time. Just wait for them to run and give you another Terminal prompt then the maintenance scripts will be done. It will take around 5 - 7 minutes to run so take a bathroom brake or watch a movie during that time.

Lastly rerun the Terminal code to see if everything is up to date:
Code: 
ls -al /var/log/*.out

Hopefully this will clear some things up.

PS: read the blog post Force Empty Trash In OSX to see how to delete Trash the Unix way.
 
Yes, I know how Unix works and I am betting I know more about Unix than you. I use Macaroni to run the daily, weekly and monthly Unix maintenance.
My issue is not related to any Trash issues. It is entirely different and I believe it is relate to the time machine local snap shot(s).. Understand?
 
Last edited:
midijeep said:
Yes, I know how Unix works and I am betting I know more about Unix than you. I use Macaroni to run the daily, weekly and monthly Unix maintenance.
My issue is not related to any Trash issues. It is entirely different and I believe it is relate to the time machine local snap shot(s).. Understand?
Click to expand...

Well mine is bigger than yours (that was a joke)! Beside Macaroni has NOT been upgraded for Lion yet so to me it looks like abandonware. Don't believe me, check your logs and it will show a lot of Macaroni errors.

Besides one could trace the problem down to checking the log files (/Applications/Utilities/Console) as soon as one notices the disappearing hard drive space. This way that person could see exactly what is eating hard drive space.
 
I usually use app cleaner for removing all sorts of stuff, but I am not completely aware if it works with pictures as well, but I would think so. Going to check that out and edit.
 
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