Deleted Lightroom catalog, free space not recovered

[CraigS]

Lightroom Version Number

11.4.1

Operating System

1. macOS 10.15 Catalina

So, my 1TB SSD on my 2018 Mac Mini was getting rather full.

I decided to ditch my LR catalog as it was 227GB. I made a copy to an external drive just in case, and then deleted it. Couldn't wait for all that sweet sweet extra HD space to show up. Except it did not.

It increased by maybe 15GB, which might have been other stuff in the bin

Anyone else experienced this?

I have run disk utility in Recovery Mode, and suggested fix for the issue of HD space not being reclaimed after you empty the bin, did not help.

Tried to boot in Safe Mode, for similar reasons, I am unable to, it just does not happen - boots normally.

I know that this is more a Mac problem, not a LR problem, but thought I would ask here incase some weirdo issue with Lightroom has caused it in this instance.

I have also asked in other Mac forums.

Thanks in advance,

Craig

 

[Ken @ Canadian Rockies]

Just curious.. did you just throw away all your edits? With no worries? Or did you export your beautiful edits to a HD for future? Then start over.... ( yes I saw the copy... good idea)

 

[CraigS]

Just curious.. did you just throw away all your edits? With no worries? Or did you export your beautiful edits to a HD for future? Then start over.... ( yes I saw the copy... good idea)

Yes, everything is exported in HD jpgs, which is all we need, and some of these catalogs go back 3 or 4 years, we do event photography so once we have the edited jpgs, we don't need the LR edits anymore, and I do archive the RAW if for some reason I needed to go back down the road.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Did you empty the trash too?

 

[allen.miller]

There are at least two possibilities.
1) Unlikely. Are you sure you actually deleted your source images? I know this is Lightroom 101, but just deleting the catalog doesn't necessarily delete the images. There are several apps that are useful for visualizing where your disk space is being consumed. I like GrandPerspective.
2) More Likely. Are you familiar with filesystem snapshots? Do you have Time Machine turned on? This is a very common cause of "missing free space" on Macs after deleting files. Even though the files you remove are no longer visible in your current view of the filesystem, if they have been snapshotted their space is still marked as used and you still have the option of using Time Machine (and some other more esoteric utilities) to retrieve them. The system will automatically delete old snapshots when space is actually required. You can view snapshots with Disk Utility->View->Show APFS Snapshots.

 

[mikebore]

You can view snapshots with Disk Utility->View->Show APFS Snapshots.

You can also delete them in Disk Utility to have the space released immediately, (right click > delete)

 

[CraigS]

Thanks for the replies, sorry I have not replied back sooner. I noticed the other day that the HD drive now reports the amount of free space that I would expect. So I will just put it down as random OS thing that self-resolved.

 

[pedz]

Thanks for the replies, sorry I have not replied back sooner. I noticed the other day that the HD drive now reports the amount of free space that I would expect. So I will just put it down as random OS thing that self-resolved.

The Time Machine snapshots are deleted after two days so eventually the space frees up as you say.

 

[CraigS]

The Time Machine snapshots are deleted after two days so eventually the space frees up as you say.

Oh, I don't use Time Machine.

 

[clee01l]

Oh, I don't use Time Machine.

You should be. IMO it is the best system Backup available. PC users could only hope for something that does backup up on Windows as well and as simply as does TimeMachine.
Everyone needs a system backup to protect against eventual disk drive failure. Every disk will fail. including SSDs. You need a recovery plan for that eventuality and to recover from stupid user mistakes.

 

[PhilBurton]

You should be. IMO it is the best system Backup available. PC users could only hope for something that does backup up on Windows as well and as simply as does TimeMachine.
Everyone needs a system backup to protect against eventual disk drive failure. Every disk will fail. including SSDs. You need a recovery plan for that eventuality and to recover from stupid user mistakes.

+1, especially since my household systems are all windows.

I use a relatively complex backup program, so that all these systems are backed up to my desktop system. I use recovery or retrieve backups almost 100% due to user error, not hardware failure.

 

[CraigS]

You should be. IMO it is the best system Backup available. PC users could only hope for something that does backup up on Windows as well and as simply as does TimeMachine.
Everyone needs a system backup to protect against eventual disk drive failure. Every disk will fail. including SSDs. You need a recovery plan for that eventuality and to recover from stupid user mistakes.

I have been using SuperDuper for about 15 years now, and while I realise that it does not to the rollback to a specific time thing, all my drives are backed up in duplicate locally and to Backblaze.