Mac Lion OS X - I deleted files, but the disk free space is not increased

I had on Mac Lion OS X just 0.5GB of free space, so I deleted like 15 GB movies => OS X wanted to confirm this operation by filling out the password => I did it and the files were deleted.

I checked again the free space on disk and there is still 0.5GB. I have tried to restart system, but nothing has changed => still 0.5GB of free space.

The thrash is empty. What is wrong with Lion OS X? I have Macbook Pro.

Thanks.

Solution 1:

Trash ownership is likely to have been set to 'root'.

Go into your terminal and type

sudo chown yourusername .Trash

This should fix the problem.

Hope this helps!

Solution 2:

This could also be an issue with Timemachine backups. It's known that it has so called "Mobilebackups" sparse disk on your startup disk while the actual drive is not connected. It keeps copies of the backups. You can check it. Go to Finder. Choose "Go->Go to folder" and type "/volumes". If you have "Mobilebackups" there then be sure that it is the cause of not increasing disk space after cleaning Trash. To disable this feature open Terminal and type "sudo tmutil disablelocal". The space on disk will get back in several seconds.

Hope this helps.

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