[G4] Hard Drive Bloat

[Keith Whaley]

Robert said,

>> One thing that can cause the disk usage to go up is watching lots of 
>> DVDs.

This is a terrible and unacceptable situation!
Without your expose here, I might never have learned that.
While I may never watch DVDs on my computer, those who do are in for a rude 
awakening!

The up-to-now simple act of watching DVDs on your computer makes your hard 
drive a gradually depletable commodity! Think abvout it...
If increasingly more and more chunks of memory are permanently set aside for 
these "just in case" situations, you have three choices:
Quite watching DVDs on your computer screen (buy a cheap TV with DVD setup?) or,
get educated as to where to look, and how to identify and delete those 
invisible place-keeper files, or
keep buying hard drives so you can keep watching DVDs on your computer!

This is a totally unacceptable situation, unless the owner/viewer knows how 
to "fix" the situation.
Seems to me a little education has to be done. For instance, how did you 
find out about this?
How would those who do view DVDs on their computer ever find it out? They 
will keep losing hard drive space as time goes on, and there's no way for 
them to know why, unless someone like you educates them as to the pitfalls 
they face for their choices...

keith whaley


Robert A. Rosenberg wrote:
> At 20:44 -0700 on 08/02/2004, Lavode wrote about [G4] Hard Drive Bloat:
> 
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have a Yikes/400, with 2 20gb Hard drives.  One acts as a backup for
>> the other, and I occasionally use CCC to image my startup disk to the
>> second drive.  I have noticed I can no longer burn DVDs without an
>> error message from the finder indicating that I need at least as much
>> space on my hard drive as there is on the DVD.  I usually keep around
>> 5gb free.  However, I recently got an error saying I was about to run
>> out of room!  I cleaned house, then checked my most recent image on the
>> second drive.  Even after house cleaning, my primary drive has 3 gb
>> less than the backup I made a month ago!  I have not added that many
>> new apps, nor do I save huge files to the drive.  I have compared the
>> folder sizes of what is visible between the primary and backup drives,
>> and they are almost the same.  So where is this 3+ gb going?  Anyone
>> have any ideas on what I can do to reclaim this lost space?
>>
>> TIA,
>> Lavode

> One thing that can cause the disk usage to go up is watching lots of 
> DVDs. Every time you watch a new DVD for the first time, its Desktop 
> files get copied to your Boot Drive never to get deleted/removed again. 
> These files are hidden so unless you look in the correct directory 
> (using a "Show Invisible/Hidden" option) you'll never know they exist or 
> be able to clean them up. Getting rid of them frees up space and the 
> only downside is that you lose your bookmark of where you left off 
> viewing the DVD and need to recopy the files if/when you view that DVD 
> again.
>