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Megabytes Slowly Disappearing

Hi Gary

I just got my first mac yesterday and set up my account and the guest account and my I used it just to test and i noticed it took some megabytes from my Mac HD its and I made sure I clicked delete files and logged out I just wondered why this happened I thought it wasn’t supposed to take HD space away could you explain why it did? and i also noticed that when I installed apps and then deleted the apps and all the files associated with them the HD space was not recovered

Thanks for your help in advance

— Justin

Comments: 6 Responses to “Megabytes Slowly Disappearing”

    14 years ago

    What do you mean by "delete" -- did you just put them in the trash, or did you empty the trash as well? If you don't empty the trash, then the files are still there, in your trash folder.
    Space on your hard drive is used for lots of things. Your system stores virtual memory, cache files, remembers your preferences, etc. Just surfing the Web stores cache files for Web pages and history.
    Megabytes are nothing -- if you have a small 500GB drive on a new Mac, then a Megabyte is just .0002 of a percent of your space. Don't worry about it.

      Justin
      14 years ago

      What I mean by delete I went to log out Guest Account from the apple menu and then a little window popped up and it said when you log out all the files in the guest will be deleted and it had a button that I clicked that said delete files and log out thats what I meant.

        14 years ago

        OK. I still wouldn't worry about a few megabytes of data on a modern hard disk. It could be used for things completely unrelated to your guest account.

    Dash06
    14 years ago

    yeah Justin. Start to worry when you are down to your last few gigabytes!
    Actually, I have been told that you should leave 10% of your drive space free eg. 16g of a 160g drive.
    Perhaps Gary could give his thoughts on this?
    Cheers.

      14 years ago

      I would definitely try to leave 25GB or more of the drive free. The system needs some drive space to use for virtual memory. You'll start to take a performance hit if you are close to running out. The base MacBook comes with a 250GB drive, and the base iMac a 500GB drive. So setting aside 25GB is usually not a problem. If you are that close to full you should be thinking about getting a larger drive, storing some stuff on an external, or archiving and removing old projects.

    Dash06
    14 years ago

    um....thats gigabytes i mean, not grams by the way....GB not g

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