Space did not free up after deleting event

Hi guys

Long time no see!

I am in Brazil shooting a documentary and I am experiencing a small, annoying issue.

My external HDD with the footage got full. So I deleted one large event (from within FCPX) and quit a few seconds after. Only 20Gb got freed, instead of 100Gb expected.

Now it's quite strange, I am having a 242Gb library, with only 141Gb of footage.




Any advice on what to do ?

Next time, shall I wait more time before quitting FCPX ?

Thanks !!!!

Analysis and render files eat up a lot of space. If you do a lot of retiming, optical flow, analyzing a lot of footage, rendering over and over a lot, that stuff can eat up space. Start by turning off background rendering, and deleting (via File menu) all render files. Any optimized footage?

Is it possible that the media still exists in another library on the same drive? Duplicating clips on the same drive doesn't actually duplicate the media, but creates extra references to it. That means that duplicates don't take up extra space on disk, but also no space is freed up until the final copy is deleted.

I thought with OS X, you had to empty the recycle bin to clear free space. Not sure that makes any sense, but I have noticed that if I delete something and then clear the recycle bin, then do a reboot, I have free space available that was the same size as what I deleted.

This works with both the internal SSD and external hard drives. Ejecting the drive does not free the space, MAC OS X seems to reserve this space until a reboot...

Yes, it is quite true in OS X (or any version of Apple desktop OS going back to the very beginning) moving files to the trash is only the first of two steps in reclaiming storage space on connected volumes.

While items moved to trash will not appear in any folder directory (except Trash) the actual data is not completely deleted from the system until you perform an Empty Trash operation ... then the additional free space created should show up in the system.

Keep in mind, files moved to the trash on external drives will NOT be completely removed if you empty the trash while the drive is not attached. Emptying the trash while the drive is disconnected, the files will still appear in the trash and the space will still be occupied when the drive is reattached later.

While rebooting the system may seem to reveal the new space, it is generally not required to complete the process.

That was what I thought, a strange quirk of OS X I guess, kind of like the 3 minute timer on the washing machine that stops you from opening the machine after a cycle has completed, I have no idea what the delay is for, other than to drive wives/mothers/sisters that do laundry insane.

With all things computer there is a great reason for everything...

It is not a "quirk" it is intentional by design so as to avoid accidentally deleting valuable data. It has ALWAYS been a two-step process.

That explains that, I wish it was 200 steps, lost so much valuable data even with 2 steps...

OS X has that ... it's Called Time Machine ...

Oh I wondered what Time machine was used for...Even Time Machine could not have saved my data...Deleting data is best left to experts not idiots like myself..

Hi guys

Thanks for your answers and sorry for coming back to it so late, I didn't have the chance to connect to the internet.

To answer your questions: no, I don't have any optimized files at all, no render, I deleted them all.

And the files are not referenced on another library, in fact on this harddrive I only have one library...

Hi Manu,

Open the Library package to see where it gets the 100 GB difference between the Library and the Event. Check the size of the Original Media folder in the package, this may be different from what Library Manager shows. Of course, you should empty your trash before doing this.

- Ronny

Thanks Ronny...

I actually ended up copying all the clips to a new library on an other HDD, deleted the original library, and copied back the library to the original HDD. It worked, my 100Gb are back.