Erasing free space Losing free space

[Batdan]

Hello,

I tried CCleaner for Mac a couple days ago.

Tried because I've had good results using it on friend's Windows machines.

The cleaner worked fine, as hoped for. Gave me back a bit over a gig.

Went to erase free space and watched my free space disappearing by the gigabytes. Waited until 25 GBs were gone and stopped the process. Sort of alarmed at the loss of that amount of space I sought info on it. None.

After looking around my machine for the "lost" space, I finally rebooted and it mostly came back, just shy about 1.25 GBs.

 

Just wondering where this goes and why there is no documentation that this is going to happen and don't worry, it will come back after restart?

 

So I have no idea where that 1.25 GBs went or what would happen if I let it continue erasing free space. Nor do I know anything about how much free space was erased.

 

Just needing some information on the Erase Free Space option.

 

Thanks for your attention to this issue.

[DennisD]

Hi Batdan, and welcome to the forum.

 

Not having a Mac,I don't know too much about them, but this is the same issue as Windows.

 

"Wipe Free Space" creates large files which overwrite the free space, and then deletes them upon completion. If the process is stopped, the large files may remain, and in Windows can be found as strangely named files in the root directory C:.

 

In your case a reboot seems to have done the trick and removed them, although running WFS again will do the same thing.

 

Hope that helps.

[Batdan]

Hello Dennis,

I just posted again, a reply to another Mac user with the same issue, with some errors in my specs but can't delete nor edit. I didn't see this reply nor got an email notice that there was one. So my apologies for my reply delay and the errors in the other post's numbers.

 

I'll try this one more time and allow it to finish, as I have Not gotten back the free space this time after three reboots. 15GBs is a lot to lose this time.

 

I'll post again when CCleaner has finished and all is well. Or not well.

 

Thanks for your input and time,

BD

[Batdan]

Okay. Downloaded new, stable release, after renaming beta to keep it in case of need.

Thanks to DennisD's mention of how Wipe Free Space works on Windows, I tried it again and let it finish. Worked fine.

Didn't get back the 15GB that went somewhere with the first try using the beta and stopping it before it was finished though. Wonder where that is?

 

Through cleaning, I did get back 4 GB.

Would like to know where to look for that file. Time to start investigating.

[DennisD]

Hi BD.

 

You may need some input from the devs if your missing free space was in fact eaten up by a beta version of CCleaner, and if it was a Windows machine I would be suggesting you download "WinDirStat", a disk usage statistics viewer which tells you what and where every file/folder is on your hard drive.

 

However, there are some Mac alternatives listed here ...

 

http://alternativeto.net/software/windirstat/?platform=mac

 

Sadly I can't comment on them, or try them, but they do appear to be free, so worth a look.

 

I read your other posts by the way, and appreciate your attempt to click the "likes" button. It's never worked on here, which may be a good thing as there could be more dislikes than likes coming our way.

 

Post back if you have no joy finding your lost space.

 

One final thought, and the Mac users on here may be able to enlighten us on this point ... I'm wondering if the Mac has a service running similar to "Volume Shadow Service", (System Restore) which makes shadow copies of any files it considers as being modified, which includes file/folders being moved around by defragging.

 

This in the recent past has unknowingly (to the folk who weren't aware of this), eaten up drive space of comps running Vista and Win7.

 

To that end Piriforms Defraggler now has a setting to switch of VSS whilst defragging.

 

 

Just a thought regarding your lost space.