Apple’s Trash
Contrary to popular opinion, there are some things about apple that really grind my gears. This one’s a good example:
I left a macbook backing up over firewire last night. I need to use that image to prepare nine or ten other macbooks for a course next week. So I kind of needed it done this morning when I got in (late, again - what’s wrong with me?).
You’ve probably guessed that it had failed. ‘Disk is Full’.
Well, OK, the mac server I use is old and recycled, and the second disk could be bigger in there. Plus I was surprised to find out that the image would be approximately 14 Gigs, compressed. Fair enough, since the machine is used for a lot of multimedia work, but the disk only had 9GB left.
Emptying the trash left it with 22GB of free space.
I mean, c’mon. The whole point of putting something in the trash is that you don’t think it’s worth as much as the space it’s taking up. Keeping it around whilst you’re not using that space makes sense, but as soon as an application needs that hard disk space, it should get it at the expense of whatever is in the trash. Running out of disk space when there’s 13 Gigabytes of data in there, that’s stupid.
End of Rant.
March 16th, 2007 at 10:10 am
I always permanently delete stuff, it’s so much easier that way. Bad luck on the failed backup!
March 16th, 2007 at 10:35 am
I should have known better, and checked the trash.
Well, I shouldn’t have *had* to, but you know what I mean.
I think windows may have this issue as well: do you know? How about vista?
March 16th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
AFAIK Windows suffers from exactly the same issue. I think the idea is that people are expected to leave things in the Recycle Bin and live with the knowledge that 10% of their hard disk is storing things they don’t plan on keeping. But most people like to clear their tracks or get some hard disk space back and empty it regularly.
Vista appears to allocate 10% of each drive by default for storing things in the Recycle Bin. You can adjust the maximum size or remove files immediately when deleted, and you can disable the delete confirmation dialog if you’re feeling brave. And UAC doesn’t prompt me.
What annoys me is having to occasionally manually clear things from the user’s Temp folder, as it’s hidden away, and can often grow large in size due to badly written third party applications that don’t clean up after themselves.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:28 pm
From what I’ve seen none of the OSes out there at the moment seem to dynamically resize the trash as other things need the space. In an ideal world, we’d have very little free space on drives and stuff would be stored in the trash pretty much forever unless the space was needed by something else, at which time it’d be cleared out oldest stuff first until the required free disk space was met.
SB, you can force the user’s temp directory to be the same as the system temp (I use E:\Temp on my scratch disk) by editing the environment variables.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Do you have to change the environment variables on a user by user basis?
March 22nd, 2007 at 9:30 am
AFAIK it has to be changed on a user by user basis, but it’s not recommended to use common/shared temp folders due to weak permissions, which is why I don’t change it. Also, if you try and use the C:\Windows\Temp folder in Vista, I think UAC will prompt you whenever you try and access it (in many cases the only things that use that folder are badly written installers that typically require elevated privileges anyway).