cant edit bc "My Startup Disk is Almost Full"?

PegLeg Media

PegLeg Media

Well-known member
what does this mean? how do i delete stuff or even locate my startup disk? its not letting me edit in FCP7 bc of this
 
You've probably got some cache files that got too big or you really really filled up that drive. Your startup disk is just the main drive on your computer. Right click and select Get Info and it will tell you how much of your drive is used. Keeping it under 80% full is a good rule of thumb.
 
PegLeg,
Your Startup Disk is the main drive on your computer, where all of the Applications are installed.

Crazy coincidence. I had this problem today as well and was able to delete some LiveType and Motion files from the Library that I didn't need because I don't use those apps, but I discovered a 32 GB discrepancy between what my startup disk said it was using, and the total tally of the files that were visible within. That's right: 32 GIGABYTES of space being used that was totally invisible to me!

I discovered with an online search that newer macs save the RAM contents to the startup disk when they go into sleep mode. This massive file is called "sleepimage," and can be found by navigating to the finder bar>Go>Go To Folder and typing "/private/var/vm" without the quotes. In my case, I have 32 GB of RAM, and must have been using it all at once at some point. This file is safe to delete. It will keep re-forming when your computer sleeps, though, unless you disable safe sleep. Here's a link to what I learned:

http://osxdaily.com/2010/10/11/sleepimage-mac/

The comments section has the steps to disable safe-sleep mode in Terminal.
 
thanks guys, that just seemed too simple to be the problem. I'm editing with 1tb hard drive and there is no way its full. Ill have to double check and start deleting stuff when I get home. I do edit everything on an external drive anyways so maybe its time to do a complete system restore
 
If you only use one drive in your machine, 1Tb is not impossible to use up, in fact, very easy. There will be loads of cache files and worse, lots of orphan files where projects never got finished, to other computer issues conspired against you. Finding them is very time consuming and difficult. The operating system has tools to help users find and delete temporary files.
 
The OP mentions editing on an external drive. But every now and then, deleting months of render cache files, etc., can clear up a lot of space on your system drive. You really have to dig through you user profile folders, look for cache files, mysteriously large folders, etc.

Also, if you use AE, go to preferences and empty the cache there as well.

I've got a bay left in my mac pro, I'm about to stick a 60GB SSD in there for caches. Adobe's support tells me AE loves an SSD cache, and when I switched my system drive to SSD it made a nice difference in render times.
 
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