Mac mysteriously deleting files?

I have been getting extremely low on open memory on my mac for a couple of weeks. I recently tried to upload a couple of pictures from a DSLR, and all of my applications crashed. I had to leave my house for work, but when I came back my computer was shutdown. I don't have it set for anything like that, and that has never happened before. I opened up activity monitor, and there is now 4GB of open memory. My memory was in the megabytes before the shutdown. What do you suppose it deleted? where should I look first?

Hi Ptkaster - welcome to the forum!

Being a newbie here myself, you will be asked the following (and likely more), so: 1) Need the specifics on your Mac (see below my avatar); 2) OS on the machine; and 3) Any recent hardware and/or software upgrades? As said, there will likely be other questions but I'll get you started - good luck! Dave

Ok Thanks!

Were you getting low on memory (ram) or disk space? If you were getting low on ram that space would clear out when the computer shut down. Any shutdown /restart of the system would clear that space. Not sure what caused the shutdown though.

In this case - even with all the details, there is no way anyone is going to have any idea what may or may not be there any longer.

1st - "low on open memory" are you talking about the hard drive and the amount of "space" unused on the drive or are you actually talking about the memory as in the "RAM" on the machine?

2nd - If that answer is hard drive space - 4 GB could easily be taken up by the sleep image alone which is deleted every time the machine shuts down - could be a combination of the sleep image, virtual memory, other cache, who knows what else...

3rd - if you are indeed talking about your hard drive space - I suggest you immediately back up that drive before you do anything else... Then, free up at least 10% of the total space on that drive before it totally crashes and won't even boot up any longer &/or get a new larger drive to put in that machine.

Slydude said:

Were you getting low on memory (ram) or disk space? If you were getting low on ram that space would clear out when the computer shut down. Any shutdown /restart of the system would clear that space. Not sure what caused the shutdown though.

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I believe that you are correct. This seems likely although to be certain im not exactly sure either. Thanks!