File deleting and security

I get that disk is full warning, too. There's a check box where you can tell it not to warn you again (but the check box must be ticked the next time you run erase free space, so it's useless).

Sometimes (my disk has four partitions, one of them with only OS X on it, no documents) I have only 944 kilobytes of free space left. I restart the machine and empty the trash, which usually works. But one time the trash told me it wouldn't open because it was secure deleting 29 gigabytes, and I couldn't stop it from doing so.

I could only power off the computer. When I restarted it and opened the trash, the folder was "Rescued Files" — 29 gigs worth. So I simply emptied it, and all was well.

Yo Brown Study...trouble is I can not get the darn thing to complete the process. After it gives me that "your startup disk is almost full" message and click OK it just sits there and won't complete the process. Maybe I have to leave it over night...dunno. Nothing is in the trash at that point so I clicked skip and got out of the program. Done that twice now. Wrong?

I've gone through this too often. You could wait til **** freezes over, and nothing will change. If the power button won't shut it down, unplug and restart it, then open the trash or check the free space by creating a folder and setting it on List view. Or simply see if Empty Trash is available in the menu.

Edit: Most of the trouble occurs when I set the thing for a wipe of 35 times (I think the machine runs out of RAM or something. Maybe there's a RAM leak). I seldom have any trouble now, if I set it to wipe 7 times. I've never had any trouble setting it to wipe only once.

Brown Study said:

I've gone through this too often. You could wait til **** freezes over, and nothing will change. If the power button won't shut it down, unplug and restart it, then open the trash or check the free space by creating a folder and setting it on List view. Or simply see if Empty Trash is available in the menu.

Click to expand...

Like I've said earlier...I think it's not that important. The process is flawed and sort of renders it useless.

Thanks for the advice though.

CrossBones said:

Nope won't work. Did the exact same thing. ``...Erasing free space" for about an hour+ and then ``...creating temporty file"...finally the message ``...your startup disk is almost full". So I hit OK and it just hangs there. Then clicked "skip" to get out of disk utility...restarted and here I am.

So, what good is this feature if you apparently never have enough disk space to create the temp file? BTW there was nothing in the trash during this entire process. Not happy.

--------------->

Click to expand...

It may not have been able to do the final "backflips" but if it wrote over the freespace with zero's or whatever, you accomplished what you were trying to do. That is make any deleted files that are just sitting there in free space unrecoverable.

BTW how many times are you setting it for? One? 7 or 35? I would only do it for one pass.

Worked ok for me, finished up and everything but remember, if it does the overwriting of the freespace, you accomplished your goal.

Did it for "one"...

How would I even know if it actually overwrote the freespace?

I think you said it ran for about an hour? It probably wrote to some of it if it didn't to all of it. Not sure why it won't go through the complete process.

I'm the one who started this thread with a question of how to wipe free space. I used to do it in windows with a program called PGP and there were others as well. It would just run and run and be writing to the free space until it was finished. I don't know exactly how OS X does it exactly and why your is acting like it is.

Maybe another forum someone would recognize your scenario. Or maybe you could start a new thread in another area of this forum and start over with the exact steps you do and what happens. Maybe someone reading in a different area will recognize it. :bone:

Well it just seems to be a poorly designed routine.

I ran the script and it went through the process until it got to the part where it was creating a temporary file...then after a while the message came up about the startup disk running our of space and then it just hangs. I used the skip button which either cancelled the operation or reversed whatever had been done to that point -- I don't know which. It's a mystery and not something that hasn't happened to a lot of people. MacHeadCase researching this fairly well in the Mac Support forums and there doesn't seem to be an answer about what to do or how the thing should work.

Again, just a bad script/routine or whatever. It just doesn't work.

I guess at this point we'll never know. Clearly the routine doesn't work as advertised.

probably like ms's defrag. will barely work at all if you have less that 15% free space, and works less and less well the less you have. might be less the fault of the os than the file system.

Worked pretty good for me. It's usually just one thing standing in the way. Do you have "Apple care?" Can you call tech support? Maybe they will recognize the scenario you're describing. Or again you could try another forum and get a whole new set of eyeballs out there that might recognize it.


Seems like a worthwhile function to me. Hope you can get it to work.

Good luck

:tusks:

Since I have Applecare I decided to call them.

They're clueless.

Had the call referred up to another level -- again "clueless"...

Somebody is suppose to call me back next week after the New Year's holiday. Right.