Where's my free space? Searching . . .

Greetings!

I decided that since I had 357 gig's of video on my iMac's hard drive that I should clean up. I moved all of the files in the "All Movies" folder to my external hard drive. The problem I now have is, the amount of available space has not changed relative to the movies I "thought" I removed. The "All Movies" folder is now empty. Any thoughts?
I'm now going to better managed all new video that I import but, I am still searching for that free space........

Thanks!

Empty Trash?

..and a 'Secure Empty Trash' at that

Thank you! It never ceases to amaze me how the obvious seems to evade me. Your advise is appreciated. Free space abounds.

Great stuff......Sawday's spot.

Remember a 'Secure' empty will permanently clear the files immediately and an ordinary one will just earmark the files for writing over when your system needs space.

A secure empty trash is *completely unnecessary* and takes an extraordinary amount of time, while providing ZERO advantage over a regular "empty trash" command in this case. I cannot for the life of me figure out why you even brought it up.

chas_m said:

I cannot for the life of me figure out why you even brought it up.

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I get the same feeling with most of your posts chas....which either seem to be mostly unnecessary attention seeking appendages to already solved cases or outright insults like this one.

As I expected, you are unable to provide any reasoning for your post.

Thought as much.

You can 'expect' what you like my friend........if it makes you feel happy about yourself.

pendlewitch said:

Great stuff......Sawday's spot.

Remember a 'Secure' empty will permanently clear the files immediately and an ordinary one will just earmark the files for writing over when your system needs space.

Click to expand...

I just use the "regular" empty trash. But, periodically, I wipe free space. I just don't like those old files cluttering up my hard drive waiting to be overwritten. Plus, it gives the computer something to do while I sleep. I would advise doing a secure empty trash when there is a lot to "take to the dump" just before bed. Might not need that sleeping pill then...

However, if you've been hacking into the CIA computers, downloading dubious documents or simply accessing your neighbours network to download pictures of their wife, a secure empty might be a good idea...

toMACsh said:

I just use the "regular" empty trash. But, periodically, I wipe free space. I just don't like those old files cluttering up my hard drive waiting to be overwritten. Plus, it gives the computer something to do while I sleep. I would advise doing a secure empty trash when there is a lot to "take to the dump" just before bed. Might not need that sleeping pill then...

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No need to do anything like a secure wipe unless you are giving the drive to someone else and are paranoid about them somehow resurrecting your files (unlikely). The files in the trash do not "clutter up the hard drive" as they are marked as in the trash and the space is available to the OS when/if it needs it. So doing a secure empty trash just bangs the heads around needlessly. If you don't like having a full trash can, just empty it.

Sawday said:

However, if you've been hacking into the CIA computers, downloading dubious documents or simply accessing your neighbours network to download pictures of their wife, a secure empty might be a good idea...

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Who told you?

MacInWin said:

No need to do anything like a secure wipe unless you are giving the drive to someone else and are paranoid about them somehow resurrecting your files (unlikely). The files in the trash do not "clutter up the hard drive" as they are marked as in the trash and the space is available to the OS when/if it needs it. So doing a secure empty trash just bangs the heads around needlessly. If you don't like having a full trash can, just empty it.

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Yeah, I knew all that except for the "banging" part. I've had my Mini since 2007 and so far it has performed flawlessly.

Well, while you are sleeping and your Mac is resting, the heads on the drives rarely move. But if you do a secure delete while you sleep, the heads are in motion as they do the multiple writes to overwrite the deleted files with 0's and 1's and whatever pattern it uses to obscure the data. The net is that you get many more movements of the head actuators. Now it's probably not going to shorten the drive life much, but the actuators are usually the mechanical part that wears out first and cause drive failures, so unless you really, really need that data obscured, I would recommend not causing those actuators to have to do that work.

So far, looks like my OS and other software becomes obsolete before the drive fails. My G3 was still a solid machine when I upgraded to the Mini in 2007.