[vdrummer]

My 15" TiBook is 9 months old, and already I've lost my iTunes Library (7,000 songs) twice, lost my iPhoto library (2,000 photos) once, and lost my Apple Mail mailboxes twice. I had hoped my big first Mac purchase would give me a reliable machine, but having to reconsruct these things five times so far is a royal pain. Sure, I could just backup each day, but setting that up and monitoring the results can be time consuming also. Additionally, I need to reset my iPod after most everytime I plug it in to transfer new files.

I think each of the five lost library problems has happened when I've gotten down to less than 5 Gb free on my 60 Gb drive, so maybe the problem is related to near-lack of disk space. I love OS X, but I think that either it or the hardware is to blame for these frustrating problems. I've used DOS and Windows machines since 1986 and had 99% full hard drives under most every DOS & Windows OS, and never had problems like this. Anyone else experiencing similar conditions or do I maybe have a lemon?

[Appleman]

5% of 60 GB would be something like 5 times 60 devided by 100...

5 GB would mean something like...

[Spheric Harlot]

You only get problems when there's less than about 1 GB of free space on your hard drive. I've routinely kept my 60GB machine at between 1 and 2.5 GB free space for six months.

The only times I've had disappearing preferences etc. was when it got to below around 800MB.

Oh, and my Windows NT at work gets *very* ungraceful if it runs out of hard disk space. Applications stop redrawing and menus disappear and stuff. I've lost data there, as well.

If it's any consolation, Jaguar will apparently include a warning notice when you get too low on available disk space.

-s*

[vdrummer]

Originally posted by Appleman:
5% of 60 GB would be something like 5 times 60 devided by 100...

5 GB would mean something like...

yes, sometimes 4, 3.5, 2.5, 2, 1.5 Gb free- it kind of varied, ya know -

[skipjack]

Originally posted by vdrummer:
yes, sometimes 4, 3.5, 2.5, 2, 1.5 Gb free- it kind of varied, ya know -

Sorry I don't have a reference right now. On my dual USB iBook, I have over half the disk available and haven't had any problems like that. On my blueberry iBook (266, running OS X, less than 1 MB of a 6 MB drive free), I'd lose my Mail preferences frequently when I got to about 100 MB free.

I guess if you need to keep your HD that full, it might be a good idea to log out or restart the computer occasionally. When I used the blueberry iBook more often, I'd have the "get info" window of my HD open so I could monitor the free space.

[NYCFarmboy]

Where does all this hard drive space go?

I have a new 1.42 dual G4... 120 gig drive..

and just checked..I only have 2.79 gigs of free space!

lol.. I know where it is.. its all my imovies and idvd files. I don't think I have cleared off any old movies from my hard drive yet.

but still.

we need to have 100,000 gig hard drives.

[superlarry]

report these bugs to apple, btw (i did when i lost some of my files):
http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/
the finder seems to handle things the worst, telling you files are somewhere when they're really not. hopefully the new finder in panther (10.3) will fix this - but it's safe to report the bug, because apple can't fix a problem it doesn't know about!

[rjt1000]

Boy I got some weird problems when I tried to run my Pismo in OSX 10.2.6 with only about 30 megs of free RAM:

I lost all the dock items I had set (went back to default)

The clock/ battery strength/ airport icons kept cycling on and off

The tracking speed reverted to default and couldnt be reset.

I was pissed for a few minutes thinking I had corrupted the OS or something

Then I realized the answer-->cleared some space and all is well (though I had to manually set the system preferences that had reverted to defaults)

Best wishes,

Rich (Pismo G3 500 20 GB)

[jsnyder]

Originally posted by vdrummer:
My 15" TiBook is 9 months old, and already I've lost my iTunes Library (7,000 songs) twice, lost my iPhoto library (2,000 photos) once, and lost my Apple Mail mailboxes twice. I had hoped my big first Mac purchase would give me a reliable machine, but having to reconsruct these things five times so far is a royal pain. Sure, I could just backup each day, but setting that up and monitoring the results can be time consuming also. Additionally, I need to reset my iPod after most everytime I plug it in to transfer new files.

I think each of the five lost library problems has happened when I've gotten down to less than 5 Gb free on my 60 Gb drive, so maybe the problem is related to near-lack of disk space. I love OS X, but I think that either it or the hardware is to blame for these frustrating problems. I've used DOS and Windows machines since 1986 and had 99% full hard drives under most every DOS & Windows OS, and never had problems like this. Anyone else experiencing similar conditions or do I maybe have a lemon?

If you're having problems _that_ serious there's probably something wrong with the hardware. Admittedly I haven't pumped as much stuff into iTunes or iPhoto (and I have heard that it gets slow with massive quantities, my guess is mostly because they store data in single XML file databases), but I've never lost anything with it or Mail, and between all of my mailboxes there are 20,580 messages being handled by mail (with *cough* 13888 unread) and I haven't lost a single one. I just selected all my 23 mailboxes and it took several seconds to sort everything, but it didn't crash and has never crashed on me.

You shouldn't be losing data with 5 GB free thats about 8% disk space free and 5 GB should be plenty for swap (not sure if it dynamically grows and shrinks it or not) and temp files and whatever else you're running/opening/closing/saving. This is unacceptable behavior and you should contact Apple. You may have a bad drive or bad RAM.

I owned an iBook for 8 months, and have had a 12" G4 for about a month. As stated above, I haven't lost anything.

[Eug Wanker]

I've run with less than 4 GB less for weeks at a time with no problems. How much memory do you have? (I have 768 MB.)

It sounds like you may something wrong with your OS install, or possibly a lemon.

Mind you, I've never gotten below about 2 GB left so YMMV.

[phobos]

What I found from my own personal experience is that problems occur if you have on the disk that you boot less than 100MB. I've divided my hard disk to 4 partitions and the one that has X always has a free space of 800MB-1GB and have no problems. But someday I got really low to 100MB and stuff started to get really weird. Than I rebooted and everything was a mess. So leave only 100-200MB just to be safe. It's ridiculous to leave 1GB of space empty just to be on the safe side

[11011001]

the problems happen when you run out of space for your virtual memory swap files.. so it really depends on what your RAM usage is like at the time and your available hard drive space. Oh, and ya, swap space is dynamic.. new swap files are created as needed. The files are stored in /var/vm (by default, that is easy to change though).

Back when I was only able to boot off of my 8 gig partition, I ran into this problem a few times. This was when I had like a 500 MB on the system disk and was doing lots of stuff.. just ran out of memory. It sucked. Problem fixed now, I bought more space, and moved my system onto that, and use my 8 gig partition for what I had intended it, a swap partition.

Your problem isn't lack of space, more likely this is bringing out another problem, and I believe that problem is probably your hard drive. You most likely have some bad blocks on it. Run a disk utility like Drive 10 on it, and these blocks will be tagged, and will no longer be used. (you'll want to perform a surface check with this program)

[vdrummer]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
I've run with less than 4 GB less for weeks at a time with no problems. How much memory do you have? (I have 768 MB.)

It sounds like you may something wrong with your OS install, or possibly a lemon.

Mind you, I've never gotten below about 2 GB left so YMMV.

I have 1 Gb of RAM. At my fullest, the drive had about 500 Mb free. Thanks much for the feedback; great to have some basis in fact for what I think is going on.

[Spheric Harlot]

Just a heads-up, though: Your email is still there. Just re-import it from your Library folder.

-s*

[vdrummer]

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
Just a heads-up, though: Your email is still there. Just re-import it from your Library folder.

-s*

Yes, thank you; I've made a full recovery, no permanent losses. I didn't expect Mail to recover the In Box messages from my 3 accounts as it did, though: after the loss of data, I started Mail and my two accounts were gone - once I re-entered and re-established the accounts, the messages (almost like magic) appeared in their In boxes. I thought I'd have to recover the messages manually.

What I find troubling is that the method for recovering the In Box messages wasn't explained at all, at least I didn't find it while searching Mail Help or at the Apple Support page. It turned out to be easy to recover the messages in my In Box, but I lucked into it, and didn't find it explained anywhere in Mail Help - some improvement could certainly be made there.

[Riemann Zeta]

Does jaguar require that one have >= RAM in free HDD space for swap files? This certainly is the case in NT. It is not required in Linux, however, all Linux systems have a dedicated swap partition, so if you run out of RAM + swap, then you are just SOL (kernel panic). If Jag. writes to a pagefile like NT, then it could be that one must have HDD = RAM space free in order to run the OS.