Running Out of Disk Space - the Happy Ending
Hi! In the end all that I had to do was reformat my new hard-drive and everything worked like a dream. I could easily transfer most of my files to the new drive. I assumed that because I had bought the drive from an Apple retailer that it would have been ready to go with my Mac. Lesson learned! Have a good week! Michael
Re: Running out of disk space
On 25/02/2005, at 10:44 AM, Michael Schmidt wrote: Hi! Yes, I am only copying my own photos folder - nothing to do with iPhoto because I've heard that the iPhoto files have to stay where they are. I guess I'm stuck because I'm also finding it difficult to even move my documents folder. I'm not touching anything to do with system files. All I really want to move to the new drive is: pictures, movies, music, my own documents and an extra folder I created simply called downloads. I'll go home from work this afternoon and try out all the suggestions so far. I'll have a look at see how the firewire drive has been formatted and maybe start again. Isn't iTunes a mean when it comes to moving the folder?! Took me two goes! All 18GB worth of songs! Hmm... If you're willing to take a slight technical risk, it's actually possible to get the entire User hierarchy onto a separate drive. The technical risk is how this would interact with a Firewire drive (ans: I don't know). I've done this on my own G5, where I installed a smaller, faster boot drive, and left the larger, slower original drive as User drive which has all the user data I have (both internal drives). Some advantages of this: 1. If you move computers or have to reformat your system drive or reinstall from scratch your system, your data is safe. 2. Probably faster to run, especially on a G5 or if the two drives are on different busses -- as your case, the internal bus and the external Firewire bus. The system can be loading system files and data files simultaneously for example. 3. Lets you use the second drive transparently. I hardly have to think about fetching stuff from the second drive -- It Just Works (TM). It needs some minor investigation and a quick change to a single system file, and you're all set. Email me if you're interested or if you think the group would find it useful. Also, if you're comfortable with the command line, there's a couple of ways of mirroring or copying an entire drive or portions thereof without the use of any third-party utilities: ditto -- copies everything, resource forks and Mac-related metadata, etc. rsync -- copies only flat files, but you can make it do things like selective backups. Great for automatic backups between computers. Cheers, Glen Low --- pixelglow software | simply brilliant stuff www.pixelglow.com
Re: Running out of disk space
Original Message From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: wamug@wamug.org.au Subject: Re: Running out of disk space Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 15:17:59 +0800 Email me if you're interested or if you think the group would find it useful. I'm buying an ATA Controller card soon so I'm quite interested in this. Cheers Paul
Re: Running out of disk space
On 26/02/2005, at 4:04 PM, Paul Kitchener wrote: Original Message From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: wamug@wamug.org.au Subject: Re: Running out of disk space Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 15:17:59 +0800 Email me if you're interested or if you think the group would find it useful. I'm buying an ATA Controller card soon so I'm quite interested in this. The basic procedure is detailed here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040716153639236 I wanted to make it slightly simpler, orient it towards User data, and less technical, so: 1. Initialize your second drive as Users, and copy over any existing Users directories over to it. You can use ditto or drag/drop from the Finder if you logged on as that user, just make sure the permissions follow those of the existing Users directory. 2. As a fall-back plan, empty out the existing Users directory on your old drive. Just leave the minimum files and directories for the main user there. (You can do this after 5, if step 5 didn't work, but you have to fix up the fstab to see the original directories again.) 3. Restart your OS X system with the second drive attached. When reboot is OK, check the log through the Console app for the UUID of the second drive. This is a combination of letters and numbers like this 299D6731---B090-9B0D4508, is unique and assigned when the disk is initialized. 4. Edit the /etc/fstab file. Add a line which says: UUID=299D6731---B090-9B0D4508 /Users hfs rw 1 2 That's spaces before /Users and between /Users, hfs, rw, 1 and 2. 5. Reboot again. This time the system should be picking up your home directories from the second drive. This procedure is good for any sort of partitition you want, e.g. for Applications, or for swap space like the original article wanted, or even something funky like /Users/glenlow/Music for your iTunes stuff. And if the fstab trick ever fails, you still have the intact, minimal directories on your old drive. If you're daring and have a few Macs available, you might try sharing a Firewire disk between them in this fashion (no I haven't tried that last scenario so don't sue me if your data is fried...) Cheers, Glen Low --- pixelglow software | simply brilliant stuff www.pixelglow.com
Re: Running out of disk space
On 24/02/2005, at 10:41 AM, Michael Schmidt wrote: Hello! I have a 7 year old G4/500mHZ with a 25GB HD. The amount of space available is shrinking fast with music and image files - I have about 4G left. I was wondering what solutions would be available to me. I will purchase a G5 (probably an iMac) later this year, probably when there's a new model. ATA hard drives are so inexpensive these days, why not just install an extra one inside your G4? It's very easy to do, will solve your storage problem for the interim until you get your new computer, and (slightly) increase the value of your G4 if you want to sell it. Or, you could just hang onto it and put it into an external Firewire box when the time comes. -- Peter HinchliffeApwin Computer Services FileMaker Pro Solutions Developer Perth, Western Australia Phone (618) 9332 6482Fax (618) 9332 0913 Mac because I prefer it -- Windows because I have to.
RE: Running out of disk space
Thank you for the tips on what to do with my aging G4 and lack of disk space...so I went out yesterday and bought myself an external/firewire drive. So last night there I was ready to transfer my music, photos, movies and documents to the new drive. Maybe you could help me with this: When I simply drag the photos (not iPhoto) folder to the new drive I either get a message Some files could not be copied. Do you want to skip these and continue? When I click Yes, files are transferred but about half of them (approx. 800MB worth) haven't been copied across and I can't work out which are on the new drive and which are still on the original drive because the original folder on my existing hard drive contains all of them. I've gone through the image files as best I can and removed and / or in the names of the files. Mind you, I would have thought that if I can have names of files on my HD with such characters, why wouldn't I be able to on the new firewire drive? Another weird one is when I try to move my documents folder I get a message saying Could not copy icon and the copying process stops (yes, there's a gap). What else can I do to move these folders to my firewire drive? Thanks people! Michael K. Schmidt
Re: Running out of disk space
On 25/2/05 12:06 PM, Michael Schmidt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: When I simply drag the photos (not iPhoto) folder to the new drive I either get a message Some files could not be copied. Do you want to skip these and continue? When I click Yes, files are transferred but about half of them (approx. 800MB worth) haven't been copied across and I can't work out which are on the new drive and which are still on the original drive because the original folder on my existing hard drive contains all of them. I've gone through the image files as best I can and removed and / or in the names of the files. Mind you, I would have thought that if I can have names of files on my HD with such characters, why wouldn't I be able to on the new firewire drive? Because of permissions in OS X you can't just drag files from one disk to another. You will need to use Carbon Copy Cloner or some other similar backup utility to maintain correct permissions. Wipe your firewire drive and try again using one of these utilities. All the best Greg Sharp
Re: Running out of disk space
I thought files ( as in documents ) just copied when you dragged them from one drive to another ! ? In which case permissions would have nothing to do with it ! ? If you don't have permission to read the files, you can't copy them. Select the iPhoto pictures folder, do a Get Info in the Finder, then change the permissions, copying them to all the enclosed folders. You should then be able to drag them to the new drive. You could do it in the Terminal using CpMac, but you could probably also do it with a nicer interface using SuperDuper http://www.shirtpocket.com/ Although you'll have to register in order to authenticate before copying. Have fun, Shay -- === Shay Telfer Perth, Western Australia Technomancer Join Team Sungroper in the Opinions for hire [POQ] 2005 World Solar Challenge http://public.xdi.org/=Shayfnord http://sungroper.asn.au/
Re: Running out of disk space
Greg Sharp wrote: On 25/2/05 12:06 PM, Michael Schmidt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: When I simply drag the photos (not iPhoto) folder to the new drive I either get a message Some files could not be copied. Do you want to skip these and continue? When I click Yes, files are transferred but about half of them (approx. 800MB worth) haven't been copied across and I can't work out which are on the new drive and which are still on the original drive because the original folder on my existing hard drive contains all of them. I've gone through the image files as best I can and removed and / or in the names of the files. Mind you, I would have thought that if I can have names of files on my HD with such characters, why wouldn't I be able to on the new firewire drive? Because of permissions in OS X you can't just drag files from one disk to another. You will need to use Carbon Copy Cloner or some other similar backup utility to maintain correct permissions. Wipe your firewire drive and try again using one of these utilities. All the best Greg Sharp I may be wrong but I thought only 'system' files and similar cause the need to use such utilities. I believe Michael is merely talking about photos etc. I did what he is attempting without issues. Michael, there may be some special files inside the 'photos folder' you mention that are causing this glitch. You could try a search on that folder for just your graphic files, try searching for .jpg .gif etc to isolate out just your media, then copy from that results list. It will however leave behind any directory structure you currently have under that folder. You can of course recreate those folders on the new drive once the pictures have been copied over. I'm an iPhoto virgin, so I know 0 about it but I imagine it could export those files or it's library to a nominated destination, any thoughts? Good Luck Paul
Re: Running out of disk space
I may be wrong but I thought only 'system' files and similar cause the need to use such utilities. All files on the disk have privileges. It may be that some of them in the iPhoto folder are set incorrectly. You could try a search on that folder for just your graphic files, try searching for .jpg .gif etc to isolate out just your media, then copy from that results list. It will however leave behind any directory structure you currently have under that folder. You can of course recreate those folders on the new drive once the pictures have been copied over. And will lose any iPhoto albums and comment metadata etc. I'm an iPhoto virgin, so I know 0 about it but I imagine it could export those files or it's library to a nominated destination, any thoughts? At worst you could burn a CD/DVD from iPhoto, change where iPhoto expects to find its library to be somewhere on the external drive, then re-import the photos into the new Library, but that would be excessive (although it would mean he'd have a backup of all the photos :) Have fun, Shay -- === Shay Telfer Perth, Western Australia Technomancer Join Team Sungroper in the Opinions for hire [POQ] 2005 World Solar Challenge http://public.xdi.org/=Shayfnord http://sungroper.asn.au/
Re: Running out of disk space
Oh come on Shay, what about the old Linux favourite mc (Midnight Commander) works a treat once compiled? Does it preserve resource forks? And it looks like it'd have to have X-Windows installed. Oh, no wait, there's a screenshot of it running in the Terminal in all its glory at the bottom of the page. http://snow.prohosting.com/guru4mac/installing_mc_on_macosx.html :) Have fun, Shay -- === Shay Telfer Perth, Western Australia Technomancer Join Team Sungroper in the Opinions for hire [POQ] 2005 World Solar Challenge http://public.xdi.org/=Shayfnord http://sungroper.asn.au/
Re: Running out of disk space
And here is a non fink install how to, very easy to do: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040112172024838 : ) On 25 Feb 2005, at 3:01 PM, Shay Telfer wrote: Oh come on Shay, what about the old Linux favourite mc (Midnight Commander) works a treat once compiled? Does it preserve resource forks? And it looks like it'd have to have X-Windows installed. Oh, no wait, there's a screenshot of it running in the Terminal in all its glory at the bottom of the page. http://snow.prohosting.com/guru4mac/installing_mc_on_macosx.html :) Have fun, Shay -- === Shay Telfer Perth, Western Australia Technomancer Join Team Sungroper in the Opinions for hire [POQ] 2005 World Solar Challenge http://public.xdi.org/=Shayfnord http://sungroper.asn.au/ -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml Guidelines - http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml Unsubscribe - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] WAMUG is powered by Stalker CommuniGatePro
Re: Running out of disk space
Michael Don't move the documents folder, move what's 'inside' the documents folder... Regards Paul Michael Schmidt wrote: Thank you for the tips snip Another weird one is when I try to move my documents folder I get a message saying Could not copy icon and the copying process stops (yes, there's a gap). snip
Running out of disk space
Hello! I have a 7 year old G4/500mHZ with a 25GB HD. The amount of space available is shrinking fast with music and image files - I have about 4G left. I was wondering what solutions would be available to me. I will purchase a G5 (probably an iMac) later this year, probably when there's a new model. Until then, I guess I could buy an external HD. If I do that, do I simply use the external drive as the main HD where I store all the files/applications that are currently located under my home folder? In other words, do I simply shift my Home folder to this external drive? I sometimes see on forums, however, that shifting the Applications folder can be a problem when it comes time to upgrade the OS. Also, if I get a massive HD, where can I backup such a large amount of data to? I currently backup my HD contents to a first generation iPod but once I go beyond the 20GB that iPod will obviously be too small. I hope your experience can direct me to what I should do. Regards, Michael
