I recently discovered how to use Smart Folders. After setting up Handbrake to rip a Turkey DVD someone had given me, I woke up the next morning (5/29) to find that it had stopped because there was only 701K on my startup disk.
Kinda freaky since I was ripping to the portable hard-drive.
I tried searching all over my MacBook and then learned how to speed up my search with Smart Folders. I searched first for all videos on my computer. I was able to clean up some old In-Law Films wedding videos that I had forgotten about. BUT I had not found the file that had eaten my hard drive. I knew that the Mac was pretty good about laying my files out in front of me (not as many temp files/folders/registry abominations as Windows) so I was sorta stressed.
I then searched for all movie files over 2 GB. I found none.
Perplexed. I thought my MacBook was just having trouble because the circle pinwheel of death kept circling. (I now know that it can’t find what is not there.)
This morning I decided to search for all files that were over 2GB, not just movies.
I found this:
I guess the console keeps logs or something. In those logs are error messages and other processes in text format. As you can tell (as far as I can tell) I had 7.45GB worth of an error message trying to Handbrake a Turkey trip DVD.
Thanks, Peter.
Actually, I think it was the DVD. After I tried my old school plug-DVD-into-camera-then-camera-into-laptop technique, I noticed that the DVD stopped suddenly when it wasn’t done playing. I’m guessing bad DVD.
But wow! I learned some new techniques, but I’m glad to have my hard-drive back.
Semi-related posts:
Did you still get some sort of a result from HandBrake that was usable? If not, shoot me an email and I can give you some other methods of getting the DVD ripped without too much trouble.
Old school worked for that one. All the other DVDs were fine, but this DVD in question made a really crackling sound. I thought it was just a bad rip, but it did it when manually imported, too.