My Hard Drive is Full!

How can I free up some space on my Mac HD? Thank you.

All you can do is copy stuff to another drive, and delete it from your main drive. You could run one of those bogus cache clearing apps, but they never free up any space of significance. Are you putting your Libraries and media on your system drive? You shouldn't. Move them to a fast secondary drive.

Also, in Preferences, turn off background rendering, and NEVER turn it back on.
Then select your Library in the Browser, go to the File menu, to "Delete Generated Library Files" and kill off ALL render files.

FCPX.guru wrote: Also, in Preferences, turn off background rendering, and NEVER turn it back on

I can't find this 'background rendering' in FCPXs 'Preference' panel; do you have a different version to the rest of us? :whistle:

FOUND IT :oops:

Go to your home folder. Select all folders and press CMD+i. This will open an info window for each file/folder. Wait for it to calculate the sizes of each folder. When that is done you will see in the top of each folder how much space it takes up.
With this information you can go in to the folders that uses the most space and from there determine if they contain anything you can delete or if you can move anything to an external drive.
You can repeat the step of selecting the folders inside a folder and showing the info to determine which subfolders contain lots of data.

Also, since you use Final Cut you can lookup how to delete render files in your library. Apple has a great article about this. This can help you free up lots of space as well

Yes wrote: How can I free up some space on my Mac HD? Thank you.

Download and scan your disk with OmniDiskSweeper. It is an excellent free tool for space management: www.omnigroup.com/more This will help you find the biggest space consumers on your hard disk then you can decide how to handle that.

You can also use Final Cut Library Manager to scan your libraries and delete unneeded space. It is inexpensive, safe, and works very well: www.arcticwhiteness.com/finalcutlibrarymanager/

FCPX.guru wrote: Are you putting your Libraries and media on your system drive? You shouldn't. Move them to a fast secondary drive.

They're going on to my macs HD. How do I fix that? I already specified my external Lacie drive for some of the project files (sorry I can't remember exactly what I did). What else should I do?

Also, in Preferences, turn off background rendering, and NEVER turn it back on.
Then select your Library in the Browser, go to the File menu, to "Delete Generated Library Files" and kill off ALL render files.

Done. Not sure what that does, but thanks, I did it

FCPX.guru wrote: Turn off background rendering, and NEVER turn it back on.

Even though i have over 5TB in storage I'm always pushing the envelope on running out of space also. if i turn off background-rednering, what exactly is lost/no longer works?

With it turned on, FCPX renders your active timeline after the specific time of it being idle. You don't need all those render files, they just eat up unnecessary space.

FCPX.guru wrote: With it turned on, FCPX renders your active timeline after the specific time of it being idle. You don't need all those render files, they just eat up unnecessary space.

Thank you ..
i get that background rendering renders the timeline while idle.. What i dont get and would like to know is, why is this an option - ie; what does that accomplish for me that will not be accomplished if i disable the option? Surely Apple spent all that time and effort to add this option to do more than simply eating up unnecessary space ?

Several years ago with FCPX first was released, there was even older hardware being used professionally, and 4K was just peaking around the corner, as was 3D (RIP). Just like using optimized or proxy, it's meant for older, slower machines than can't get decent enough playback without rendering. It is an "option" so if you don't need it, and most of today's Macs don't, turn it off, delete the render files.

Ahh, ok that makes perfect sense - thank you for the clarification.

I was sad about the death of 3D, but now we have 360° to help ease the pain!

Even my Mac Pro cannot play back some of my timelines in real time using 4K footage in multiple layers and multiple layers of graphics. For those times Rendering is necessary. I leave BR on with a 15 second delay. I also have an automator action to clear my cache files quickly. I don't agree that BR should never be on. There are circumstances where it makes perfect sense. That is for you to decide. That is why it's an option.

I am a bit late - but have you considered that there is a way to clean up render files? Check your media library. Then, in "File" you find something like "Delete generated media data" to delete unused or all render files. (I have a German version, so I don't know the exact name of the command).

I use that to clean up after finishing a project.

Open terminal and type this: sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000000 4

If you have time machine, and high sierra, macos keeps local "snapshots" for backup purposes. Supposedly they are automatically freed when space is needed, but I have seen cases where they don't release the hdd space. Let us know if this worked for you!