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Mac message says "start up disc is full" stressing me out!

Hello everyone, 

My Macbook keeps popping up a message on my screen saying that my start up disk is full.... So in reaction to this I have watched some youtube videos and taking there advice by deleting all my downloads, pictures, videos, files ect I have literally deleted  almost everything... a few weeks down the line I'm getting this same pop up again! 

It seems to me like there are some large files or something stored on my laptop in a place that i cannot find easily? does anyone know were this may be or how i could fix this problem? 

thanks 

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I think a lot us are running clsoe to the edge these days. I run a Mac and check how full my disk every now and again. If it's getting full, the first thing I'll do is to empty the trash. Then I run Disk Inventory X which will show you in a helpful way what type of files as well as the specific files that are taking up space.

On one occasion, I roughly added up all the directories I was being shown and they came to a lot less than the size of my disk. Apple advised me to wipe the disk and start again. This sorted the issue and now I manage to maintain about 20% spare capacity. I was given AppleCare when I bought my last machine so they walked me through the process over the phone. Whilst I could probably do it alone, I wouldn't want to.

Start with trash and Disk Inventory X. If nothing makes sense still, Marek's worth a call. 

Haha yes! I'm even low on phone memory too! great thanks i will try trash and Disk inventory X - someone else at work recommended this too. thanks.

Watch out for videos (e.g. from an iPhone) - they can get to several GB. 

If you open your user folder (your login name) in list view, and make sure you have selected View - View options, tick on 'size' and 'calculate all sizes' then it will (eventually) calculate all file & folder sizes, you can then open the big folders (click on the reveal triangle) to see what's happening at the level below. You may well find some unexpected large files that you can delete, or archive off to a separate hard drive (or 2, as a backup).

There can sometimes be space wasted through caches - Onyx is one way of clearing these caches, though you probably don't want to clear all of them (e.g. cookies may be needed to login to web sites).

Finally, some apps can take up a huge amount of space, e.g. I've just checked & found that Garageband support files in hard drive/library/application support/ are 2.32 GB on my mac.

ALTHOUGH Cocktail (http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/) may not have a big effect on your machine, for me it is basic regular maintenence performed daily. It minimises the chance of problems.

It does many of the things that would be done automatically were you to leave your machine running overnight. OS X is based on UNIX that was intended to run 24/7, like the telephone network.

Cocktail deletes a lot of temporay files that need deletion.

Another piece of software that's invaluable is Apple's own Activity Monitor. 'Disk usage' is a button at the bottom.

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