Why doesn't storage on disk increase when I span files?

Timothy Bert shared this question 11 years ago
Answered

Pretty sure I missed the point of this app or I'm doing something wrong. I just moved 130GB worth of TV shows and movies to an external drive using this app. I verified that the files are now on the external drive. They are also no longer on my Mac and I emptied the trash, but I did not gain any additional space on my Mac drive. Any ideas what I'm missing?

Replies (12)

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You didn't miss anything.


Are you sure you emptied the trash?


Did you get any alert from TuneSpan about not being able to trash any files?


Sometimes the Finder takes a bit to show updated sizes, but the space should be there.


Try giving your computer a restart to see if that provokes Finder to show you the updated drive usage.

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I verified that I emptied the trash. I also shut down and rebooted before I posted this question. I recently got a new Mac and left the TV shows in the cloud originally to save disk space. When I read about this app, I decided to try it out. I downloaded all of the TV shows from iTunes and verified that the disk space got reduced. But then when I spanned to the external drive, the external drive space shrunk as expected but I did not gain any space on the Mac drive.

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That's odd.


But, were you expecting to claim space over what you had before to video files were in the cloud?


After you downloaded them, they were on your internal drive. Then, you spanned them out. After that, available space would be equivalent to what it was when the files were in the cloud.


Is that not the case?

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No - I brought them over to the drive and then spanned them because my understanding was that the drive space would return to the level when the files were in the cloud. It did not. My drive was at 280GB when files were in cloud. 410GB after files moved to Mac. Remained at 420GB after I spanned them to external drive. Expected and hoped it would return to 280GB.

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Have you checked the iTunes Media folder and seen that the files are no longer on your internal drive in the default location? Before you emptied the trash, did you look at the contents? Were your video files in there?


I am leaning toward thinking this could be an issue with Finder reporting the correct available space.


But, did you have both SD and HD versions of these video files. Could you have only spanned one version and the other is still on the internal drive.


TuneSpan can span both SD and HD video files, but because of limitations in the XML iTunes Library file, it can only be aware of one at a time. I can give you instructions in how to span the other version if this may be the case.


Also, have you tried checking the size of your iTunes Media folder, rather than just the available space on the drive? Does it look like the folder size is being reported correctly, or not?

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I have the exact same problem, except I didn't have them in the cloud they were only on the hard drive. Before starting I had 127 GB free space left, I spanned 217 GB of data to an external drive. I should have around 344 GB of free space now but I still only have 127 GB. Files are on external drive now and are no longer on internal hard drive. I verified both. Can't figure this out for anything....

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I know it's been a while on this topic, but I'm looking back through all this stuff and wanted to check back in about this problem.


Did the free space ever come back?


Since this issue came up on here, I believe I talked to another user and we found out that the issue may have to do with Local Backups being done by Time Machine.


Even though the files have been spanned out, there is still a hidden local backup of the files on your internal hard drive.


I wasn't aware of this since I don't have local backups running on my computer.


If that is the case, the backup should be removed over time and you should have gotten your free space.


Please let me know if anything has changed for either of you in this thread.

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I am having the same problem - moved 130GB to external hard drive, emptied trash, checked that files were no longer on the original hard drive and have been moved to new one. All okay, except the original hard drive hasn't reduced - there is now around the same amount of space taken up by 'Backup' files. I can't find these anywhere. I also use Time Machine, so maybe the solution you found Pico Mitchell is the same for me - but how do I stop that happening, and how do I get rid of the large backup file that was created?


Thanks,


Tim

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So for a bit of background, how Local Backups work, you can actually consider this as "free space". As you need the space, OS X will automatically delete Local Backups as necessary.


But, if you would like to computer turn off local backups and truly get all the free space back, you can follow the instructions on this site:


http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/28/disabl...

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Hi. I tried this, and all it's done so far is reclassify the storage from 'Backup' to 'Other' - see screenshot. Is there anything I can do to get rid of this data - I want to do this, as my hard drive is approaching 90% full and I'm experiencing slow performance. Please help if you can.

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Oh, my apologies - after running Time Machine again manually I now have my space back: see pic. Thanks for all your help.

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Glad to hear it worked out! Thanks for letting me know.

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