deleting files takes up more space???

well ive been in the process of deleting a few things and sometimes i notice that when i throw something into the trash and empty it, my available hd space goes down rather than freeing up space. is this something common? i know that it cant possibly be correct, can it? have any of you experienced this? i dont know whether or not i should be alarmed, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

restart your computer...that "extra" space will go bye bye...it happened to me once...very strange. I just rebooted, and there you have it. It might even work by just loggin out then loggin back in. but also do that other stuff...(repairing permissions and whatnot).

witeshark said:

Well run repair permissions. After every software update, and about every 2 weeks: close all apps and log totally off. Log on, go in Finder, Applications. Utilities, Disk Utility. After the message -getting disk information- select volume (below the hard drive name -upper left corner). Just highlight it. Now look to the lower two things are there near the middle, verify permissions, repair permissions. Also are you running crons or Mac janitor? And space is sometimes recovered on each log off, if you log off then back on see if space is recovered. Hard drives don't erase the data of deleted files, they mark the data as unwanted/used and eventually over write it

Click to expand...

If this is indeed the case then perhaps the mechanism by which the HFS+ filesystem deletes files should be evaluated. I've never heard of something like this happening before.

The next section can be ignored

< rant >
And as for the deletion thing, thats actually only partially true. The filesystem marks it as unused. I have actually used a filesystem configured in such a way that it overwrites any file that is deleted with zeros for security reasons (this was a custom filesystem built for linux) and as such the data was indeed removed and became, for the most part, unrecoverable without the use of rather expensive equipment. This is a common myth about harddisks and the way they work.
</ rant >


Sorry about that, its just one of those misconceptions that keeps being perpetuated that really bothers me sometimes.