Beachballing after deleting 90GB

[Junosbetterhalf]

So a friend of mine called me a couple of nights ago, saying that her Mac was showing an alert that the startup disk has no more space. Investigated it with her and the culprit was her habit of dragging music downloads into iTunes but not deleting them from the downloads folder :roll eyes:

So we went through the folder and deleted all the duplicate music and restarted.

Now it's beach balling everywhere and apps are taking forever to open if they even open at all (looking at you, System Prefs).

A friend of mine suggested clearing the Caches and Launch Agents folders in the Library. Is this sound advice?

And anything else you think might help would be much appreciated!

 

[Bruno09]

Hi,

I would suggest to install and run "Maintenance" (same developer as Onyx).

Use the default options.

 

[NoBoMac]

Might be reindexing the drive? 90GB of files and meta-data for Spotlight might be a chunk of work for the system to chew on. Maybe let it run for a while before using again.

 

[Weaselboy]

A friend of mine suggested clearing the Caches and Launch Agents folders in the Library. Is this sound advice?

Rather than that, do a safe mode boot by holding the shift key at startup. That will do a disk check, clear caches, and bypass any login or startup items like the launch agents folder.

If that fixes it, try a normal reboot and tell us what happens.

I don't see how deleting music would cause this. I'm wondering is she had previously deleted a system file or something that was sitting in the trash, and when you finally had her empty the trash it borked the OS.

 

[Junosbetterhalf]

Thanks for the responses guys.

We booted it in safe mode and it seemed okay, rebooted and it's working enough for her to get a college assignment done but it's still much slower, especially opening apps.

It's also taking a long time to get to login screen (just normal boot).

She's going to use it a couple of days and let me know if it's speeding up, then maybe run Maintenance as suggested above on the weekend.

Any other thoughts on non-app downloading steps to take are welcome!

I don't see how deleting music would cause this. I'm wondering is she had previously deleted a system file or something that was sitting in the trash, and when you finally had her empty the trash it borked the OS.

Since they're hidden by default, I can't see her ever going that far down the file path. With the general mainstream Mac user anything is possible though!

I have a feeling we should have trashed the music in parts, 5-10gb each time, it was me who said just empty the trash with 90gb in there so I'd really like to get this running for her.

 

[Weaselboy]

I have a feeling we should have trashed the music in parts, 5-10gb each time, it was me who said just empty the trash with 90gb in there so I'd really like to get this running for her.

Nah... no way that would cause trouble on a properly functioning machine. You can just dump 100GB in the trash and empty it all day without issue.

That general slowness and slow boot with slow app launches sounds a bit like a hard drive in its death throes. Does Disk Utility verify disk show any errors?

If she does not have a backup, she should get one done pronto before the drive dies completely.

A bad drive cable can also cause this, but that is much less common.

 

[Junosbetterhalf]

Happy to report it's doing a lot better, working as expected now.

Verified the Disk, came back green.

I wonder if it was spotlight re-indexing, I'm not sure where that's displayed on Yosemite?

Anyway, it's working, all that matters. Appreciate the help guys! Thank you.