[mycomputeriscool]

For those of you who have used FileVault, I know most people hate it when it reclaims disk space because it takes a long time but I don't really mind it. So anyway, I recently deleted a whole bunch of music (several gigs worth) and since the disk space is not freed up right away after emptying the trash, I have to wait until FileVault asks me to reclaim the space.

FileVault doesn't always ask to free up the space when I restart, log off, or shut down. It seems random. It's been about 3 days now and FileVault still hasn't asked me if I want to reclaim space. I've restarted and shut down several times during this period. So is there a way to manually reclaim space or force FileVault into reclaiming the space? I only deleted all that music so I could have enough disk space to install some things...

Sorry if this is a stupid question...

[Cadaver]

I know this is an old thread, but I recently had the same issue... I was missing at least 10GB of space, but couldn't get FileVault to give me it's usual "reclaim space?" option at shutdown/reboot (despite countless tries over 48 hrs).

This is the procedure to which I had to resort to forcibly reclaim missing free space on my FileVault-encrypted PowerBook G4...

I figured out how to force a space reclaim... but the process isn't exactly point-and-click.

•I mounted the PowerBook via Firewire target disk mode on my desktop G5 and copied over my PB account's .sparseimage file to my desktop (didn't want to work on the original file in case I screwed it up).
•Used the terminal command "hdiutil compact" on the .sparseimage file (type "hdiutil compact " (with a trailing space) then before hitting return, drag the icon of the .sparseimage file on to the terminal. That'll insert the path of the file. Hit return.)
•Let it run. Took about 15 minutes or so. On a 27GB .sparseimage, the procedure recovered 12.5GB!
•Deleted the original .sparseimage from my PowerBook, emptied the trash, and copied over the newly compacted one. Rebooted the PB, and voila!

[NeXTLoop]

Not sure if this is the problem these two cases, but FileVault will not reclaim space if you're running off of battery power..... which is a good thing. If it did, there would be too much chance that, depending on how much space it had to reclaim, it might not be completed before your battery ran down.... which would be a bad thing.