Help for new clueless mac user

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Hi I was given my Dad's old ibook g4 about a year ago and have been loving the mac system. I have been importing all of my cd's and pix onto the hard drive. Recently, I got a message stating that my startup disk was close to full. So, I went into the hard drive and started deleting a bunch of files and games that I no longer use. I thought that did the trick. Next my mac froze up and basically dumped a bunch of my information. My itunes dumped all of my music files eventhough they are still on my hard drive and I lost all of my financial information on Quicken. When I bring up Safari it dumped all of my bookmarked web pages. Basically it dumped everything I had except for music and pix.

My hard drive shows only 412mb of memory left. I bought an external hard drive and put all of my music and pix on that as a backup but still have them on the hard drive to have access. I am at a total loss of words on what to do. I can't believe it dumped all my financial info etc... without a warning.

Any help? Thanks in advance for any advice you can lend.
 
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15" 2014 MacBook Pro, i7 2.5Ghz, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD; iPad 3, iPhone 6
There is a lot of confusing information in your post, but it sounds like you trashed your home directory which would explain why your Mac froze and why your bookmarks, financials etc are gone. However the fact that your HDD is still only showing 412MB free would indicate the files are still in your trash can and could possibly be restored.

What exactly did you delete? When deleting files, you need to be careful. Generally, don't dump directories, just files.
 
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MacBook Pro | iMac(2.1 G5) | MacBook(2.16 C2D) | MacMini (1.67 CD) | iPhone 4 | iPad (3rd Gen)
OS X usually dynamically allocates 5-10GB from the HDD space for its virtual memory. If you are working with several applications at the same time, data from the non-active windows will be saved in there. You don't seem to have any free space for the VM. Try to delete unwanted files/folders as soon as you can. Once you recover enough space for the VM it should work fine.
 
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Now that I think about it in the process of trying to free up some memory I did mess around with the home directory. Upon doing some research here I guess when you mess with that home directory you really screw things up. Well once my computer restarted I looked for all of the info I had lost and it was no where to be found. I even looked in the trash.

So, first of all is there anyway to restore that stuff even if it's not in the trash?

Second of all, if I were to delete all of my music files (since they are already backed up), would that help things out? I just don't know how to access the music files through itunes if they're not on my hard drive.

I'm sorry for the ramblings. I hope you guys can make sense of what I've done. Thanks for the response Zoolook.
 
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You don't need the files on your hard drive for iTunes to work. You can add them into your library from a networked/external drive without a problem. Of course, you'll have to have that drive available whenever you want to listen to them.
 
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I am pretty sure that if you trash your home directory, it would be recreated when you reboot. How many directories do you have under /users? You may find an old directory somewhere. Also using spotlight search for your quicken file name.

Restoring deleted files could be problematic on a HDD where there is so little space as the free space would be overwritten pretty quickly.
 

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