Hard drive space vanishing after project?

[rpvee]

I have a 500 GB hard drive. I've used a lot of it, down to the point where I only had about 7 GB left (like I said, I used a lot of it). I was working with Audacity and imported a large file into it, and then noticed my hard drive space started to vanish. I found this to be odd so I closed the program, but the message saying "Cleaning up temporary files" that I usually get after closing a big project didn't come up. So I opened a new project and closed it, then I got the cleaning up message. After that was done, though, I still had less than a GB left.

I've tried shutting down my computer, that didn't do anything. I did the Disk Cleanup thing so now I'm back up to about 5 GB. But I'd like to know what happened exactly. Haven't downloaded or installed anything recently.

Thanks!!

[kozikowski]

You posted in the Audacity 1.2 section of the forum. Are you running 1.2? If you are, stop that.

Audacity 1.2 is very old and no longer supported,
patched, corrected, or updated. Audacity 1.2 can
be unstable on newer computers.

Download and install the latest Audacity 1.3 from here...

http://audacityteam.org/download/

You can install both audacity 1.2 and Audacity 1.3 on
the same computer, but only use one at a time.

Audacity 1.2 will not open projects made on Audacity 1.3.

If you use MP3 or some of the more modern audio
compression formats, get Lame and FFMpeg software
from the same web site. Do not use older software
or software from other web sites, even though they
may have the same names.

imported a large file into it

What kind of show and how long? Stereo?

Koz

[rpvee]

Oh, I didn't realize it was 1.2's section of the board. I am indeed using 1.3. It was a movie file with 6 surround sound channels. It hadn't even finished importing because the hard drive space was vanishing more and more as it was importing, so I had to cancel.

[waxcylinder]

I moved this to the 1.3 section for you

WC

[Edgar]

Look in your Audacity Temp folder and make sure it is empty, you may find it by looking in Preferences:

tempo.png (38.01 KiB) Viewed 872 times

Now look in the AutoSave folder, it can be found in the same location as the audacity.cfg settings file. The location depends, look here:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Preferences#stored
for information on how to find it on your system. Make sure it is empty.

[rpvee]

Both of those locations don't have much of anything in them at all. Meanwhile, some memory is still vanishing.

[Edgar]

Both of these locations (temp & AutoSave) should have nothing in them.

The next step is to start Audacity and select menu File > Save Project As...; when the Save As dialog opens make a note of exactly what location was last used (this is the folder the dialog defaults to showing). Using Windows Explorer examine this folder to make sure there is no unwanted stuff there.

If you still cannot locate the unwanted material, you will need to do a custom search based on file creation date (using the date and time when the problem occurred). Since I do not know what operating system you are using (Win7, XP etc.) I cannot give you explicit directions for this kind of search.

Just so you understand, having only 5GB of 500GB free (i.e. 1%) is asking for trouble. You need to free up at least 100GB (20%)--I know this sounds difficult, but do the best you can!

[rpvee]

Both of these locations (temp & AutoSave) should have nothing in them.

The next step is to start Audacity and select menu File > Save Project As...; when the Save As dialog opens make a note of exactly what location was last used (this is the folder the dialog defaults to showing). Using Windows Explorer examine this folder to make sure there is no unwanted stuff there.

If you still cannot locate the unwanted material, you will need to do a custom search based on file creation date (using the date and time when the problem occurred). Since I do not know what operating system you are using (Win7, XP etc.) I cannot give you explicit directions for this kind of search.

Just so you understand, having only 5GB of 500GB free (i.e. 1%) is asking for trouble. You need to free up at least 100GB (20%)--I know this sounds difficult, but do the best you can!

Nothing unwanted in the folder, everything that should be there is there and the size it should be.

I'm using Vista. So please do tell!

And what's wrong with having so little memory? At least 100GB free is 100GB wasted.

[Edgar]

If you still cannot locate the unwanted material, you will need to do a custom search

Just so you understand, having only 5GB of 500GB free (i.e. 1%) is asking for trouble.

I'm using Vista. So please do tell!

And what's wrong with having so little memory? At least 100GB free is 100GB wasted.

I do not have a Vista install so I cannot give you explicit steps for a search-by-date. This site has a very complete and accurate description of how do it on Vista:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows- ... ta-search/

As for needing "head room" on your drive, there are a lot of things which go on behind the scenes (OS as well as app -based) which rely on having some spare space on the hard drive. Some of these are the Trashcan, de-fragging and the creation of "unseen" files like temporary, autosave and backup files; antivirus software often also needs some spare disk space -- it all adds up. Google around on the net and you will find plenty of information from reliable sources which will give you a better idea of your personal set-aside needs--20% is probably leaning toward the "generous" side 10% is probably a bare minimum (IMVHO).