editing 80ghz and Macintosh hard drives

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Hi, you guys! :)

I have been, or so I thought, making sure that I have cleared out my Mac of any unnecessary clutter. I have a 80gig hard drive. Since I am using Final Cut, I have been going to the FCP document file and clearing out the capture scratch file.

I have a bypass card that allows me to save all my work onto my external hard drive, as suggestioned by our own knightly, thank you very much.

However...
when I look at my finder, it says that I only have 17gig left available. Nothing on my desktop is that big, only one file that is 6gig. Everything else is kilobites or megabites and not that many of them.

Since all my FCP stuff is on my external, and even now I don't have the external hooked up to my Mac, what could be cluttering up more than 50% of my hard drive and how do I clear it out? Can I clear it out? The only program I have on it is FCP, I wouldn't think that it would take up that much room. I would like to install After Effects on it because I really need to teach myself how to use it.

Maybe I am forgetting something. So, how do I empty out some space? I thought I was clearing it out, obviously I was not.....:rolleyes:

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...Yeah I think so, too. I think that I am going to move it to my external or get rid of it. But I have to figure out what to dump. I think I am being paranoid about the stuff I want to keep.

Still, does anything look too full?

20gb on desktop; 33.87gb in home; 4.45gb in applications; 13.34gb in documents...

I guess it would explain why my finder only registers 16.85gb left, but I didn't think that the 80gb hard drive would fill up like that when I am not saving anything to my laptop...I'll be moving that 20gb of stuff on my desktop to my external....and maybe I should get the MacJanitor....

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It's scary how quickly 80gig will fill up. I have an 80gig drive, and two 160gig drives that are all virtually full on my desktop. I have two external 500gig drives that are both about 1/3-1/2 full --but that's from my DJing stuff.. it's a mirrored copy of all my DJ music.

It's amazing to think about the old days though. I remember when a 20megabyte hard drive seemed huge. My first "real" computer (not counting the TI 99/4a) didn't have a hard drive, and only have 1 meg of ram. :D
 
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Will Vincent said:
It's scary how quickly 80gig will fill up. I have an 80gig drive, and two 160gig drives that are all virtually full on my desktop. I have two external 500gig drives that are both about 1/3-1/2 full --but that's from my DJing stuff.. it's a mirrored copy of all my DJ music.

It's amazing to think about the old days though. I remember when a 20megabyte hard drive seemed huge. My first "real" computer (not counting the TI 99/4a) didn't have a hard drive, and only have 1 meg of ram. :D
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When I was purchasing things for my little set up, people kept telling me how I would never fill up my hard drive. I always knew it would fill up fast. Right now what I am trying to do is figure out what I can trash and what I should keep. All the writing I have shouldn't take up GBs of space.

That is why I was trying to figure out if maybe I didn't empty my capture scratch files or something else that I didn't need....

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I've got a half Tb (terra byte) in my machine and about another Tb in full external drives on my desk. I use the external drives to archive all of my stuff, so I just let them fill up, then set them aside and use another 180 Gb at a time. I use the wiebetech external drive dock to sling them.
 
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knightly said:
I've got a half Tb (terra byte) in my machine and about another Tb in full external drives on my desk. I use the external drives to archive all of my stuff, so I just let them fill up, then set them aside and use another 180 Gb at a time. I use the wiebetech external drive dock to sling them.
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...I want a terrabyte....:grumpy::D

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It definitely looks like Documents and Desktop are your culprits. I say that because the content from both folders can be moved to an external drive without affecting your system. Start with the desktop, as that's an awful lot of stuff to be cluttering up your space.

But simply moving the bulk of those two folders is going to free up 33 gigs.

I personally never keep anything but temporary files on my desktop or in my documents folder. I have external drives for EVERYTHING, which really saved my bacon a few weeks ago when my Mac died in the middle of a project. I just hooked up the project drive to a different Mac and I was good to go.
 
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spinner said:
...I want a terrabyte....:grumpy::D

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Keep in mind, I have several 180Gb drives sitting on my desk...not a single Terrabyte. I use them 'til their full, then buy a new one for $90ish dollars (250Gb is getting more standard and cheaper).

This workflow is specifically why I got the drivedock. keeps me from having to buy the more expensive external enclosure drives and keeps my space expandable and accessible just by switching out the drive.

80 Gb seems really tiny confined space to work in for video (to me). I think I showed you how to switch your scratch disks at one point, you can use that to target your footage to the external disk and create projects there. I always start a new project by making a folder for the project, then targetting it with the scratch disk preferences. That way, the whole project, including render files are all stored with the project. Then to move it around, I just plug in the disk and select that project folder in the prefs before opening the project. Makes it very simple to move from disk to disk without clogging up my system disk...which is not a separate editing machine from my day to day machine.
 
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I am cleaning everything out of my hard drive now.

When I check my desktop, it says that I have 18.4 gb on it. I don't have anything that would add up to 18gb on my desktop.

I think I remember someone saying I don't need my render files. I am not saving anything to my laptop, so I would think that I could get rid of the render files on my laptop. However even they do not add up to 18gb.

My user file is 36gb and I am looking it over, it also doesn't seem to have that much on it.

I should have at least 30gb of open space. Anyone have anymore suggestions while I clean out some of this stuff?

I might have to get the MacJanitor after all.....

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I haven't read through every single post in this thread but if it hasn't been suggested and you haven't tried it, go to Disk Utility in your Utilities folder and do a Repair Permissions on that drive. That might fix your problem.
 
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Will Vincent said:
You mean you haven't yet? *gasp*
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...no...:blush:

I think I'll be getting it in a day or so.

..and Thunderclap, I did run the disk utility, no change....

Anyway after looking in all my files, the most that my laptop should have on it is maybe a little over 40gb, but certainly not 74gb...

what makes me nervous is the idea that I would have to know what I was looking at in terms of the "code" stuff on my computer. I don't have any knowledge of that sort of thing.

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I'd be willing to bet a lot of the space is being used up by files in your libraries, both the user and system library. There are a lot of files, such as preferences and such for applications, that as far as I know the computer needs to run efficiently and correctly. For example my Library takes up 10gigs of space and my system library is another 4gigs. Also, is it just FCP you are using not Finul Cut Studio? Because if have Final Cut Studio or any applications like Live Type or Soundtrack Pro chances are you may have installed all the additional fonts and sound fx that end up taking up gigs upon gigs of space. Why do you need to clear up space anyway? It is quite normal to have 40+ gigs of applications and system files. Theoretically your startup drive should only contain these thing s and everything else should be stored on external or secondary drives...this reduces the chances of crashing your startup drive. Anyway, hope this helps.
 
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rmckeague said:
Why do you need to clear up space anyway? It is quite normal to have 40+ gigs of applications and system files. Theoretically your startup drive should only contain these thing s and everything else should be stored on external or secondary drives...this reduces the chances of crashing your startup drive. Anyway, hope this helps.
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...because the last project I did was about 120gigs, the one before that was about 80gigs. As soon as I get my tax rebate, I'm high-tailin' it to Best Buy for my TB, dang it! Plus when I export to create DVDs, I use iDVD and some of the exports I have just been putting on my desktop. The projects are saved to my external, however. And I would also like to leave my writings, my notes etc on my Mac, but it just seems to fill up so quickly. Right now, I only have 7 gigs left on my laptop....


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you should be putting all your project files including media, render, and exports and DVD authoring exports on external drives. I see you are planning on buying a Terabyte of external space, but you may want to consider something smaller. For example if instead of a terabyte you were to get 2 500G harddrives you would have the same amount of space, but also have the possibility to backup your important project and media files to a second external harddrive. It is something you may want to consider as harddrives are constantly failing and thus it is a good idea to backup your files.
 
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