Help backing up hard drive (start up disk)!

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Hello all. I am hoping that someone out there has an answer for me. For some reason when I drag my files to a dvd to be backed up, I appear to be losing memory on my hard drive! Every time it gets to be under 1GB, I get a warning that tells me that my start up drive/disk is almost full. So, to fix the problem, I went through my downloads to start trashing them. I freed up about 2 gigs of space (which showed on my hard drive) and after dragging about 2 gigs of pictures onto a DVD, it's showing me the warning again! It's almost as though when I'm dragging the pics to the DVD, my computer is backing up the files somewhere. But I can't figure out where! Can anyone help me? I feel like I'm never going to be able to back up my computer if this keeps happening. Either that or I'm going to have to wast a bunch of DVD's just burning and deleting a little at a time. :(
 

chscag

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Where are you dragging the files from? Go back and look and you'll probably see that dragging the files onto a DVD for burning does not remove them from your hard drive. After the files have been safely burned to the DVD, delete them from your hard drive.
 
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chas_m

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When you are creating a DVD, the Mac makes a temporary copy of EVERYTHING you put on it, and then does so AGAIN (and again temporarily) during the actual burning process.

Bottom line: don't burn DVDs unless you have LOTS and LOTS of free space.

Second bottom line: from your post you are CLEARLY too full overall on your hard drive. The proper solution to this problem is an external HD, not burning DVDs. Indeed, why aren't you using Time Machine in the first place?
 
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Second bottom line: from your post you are CLEARLY too full overall on your hard drive. The proper solution to this problem is an external HD, not burning DVDs. Indeed, why aren't you using Time Machine in the first place?

I need a quick clarification for myself and maybe the OP as well. Chas_m I want to try and understand your comment and exactly how Time Machine works. Are you saying that if you use Time Machine and you have a large enough Time Machine hard drive, that you can delete files on your Mac hard drive, (Especially when it is getting full.) but still retain access to the deleted files via Time Machine? I must be reading this wrong. You can't view the files from Time Machine right you can only restore from Time Machine right? Do you mean to just offload the files to another HDD in order to save them and free up room on the Mac drive?

I don't mean to be dense I'm just not following your thought process.

Regards,

Pat
 
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Thanks to all who have responded already! To address ChasM, I am not using Time Machine because it will make a copy of a file each time I change it. Being that I am a photographer, I will be making multiple changes to multiple files. I don't need a second, third, eleventh copy of one picture. Also, I am backing up on an external hard drive as well. However, a smart photographer will always back up her files in two places and on different formats. That being said, a smart person would have done this forever ago. That's where the problem lies. The only reason I'm making DVD's is to be sure I don't lose any material.

To chascag, how do I get rid of those temporary files?
 

chscag

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Just select them and drag to the Trash, or command click (right click) and send to Trash. Of course first verify that the burned copies on the DVD are readable.
 
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I've looked in my temporary folder and see nothing. As for making sure that the burned copies are readable, I can't do that until I complete the burn. Being that I have a 5GB dvd-r, I have 2GB's left that I don't want to waste. :/
 

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