Reclaiming space in or from a vault

Santa1900

Hi Guys,



I really have a problem with this but maybe I'm missing something. I read the earlier threads about looking at hidden files in a vault or compacting it and so on, and Mike and Khad and everyone here have been great about giving advice. But here is my problem which I have now encountered repeatedly when moving items from a vault to the trash and wanting to reclaim that space for my hard drive. I'll take it step by step 1. I may be wrong but I thought creating a vault of lets say 85 GB and filling it with 35 GB of stuff (leaving 50 GB free) would only use up 35 GB of my Mac hard drive. If this is not the case and all of the 85 GB of vault space is "reserved" for the vault and not available, than forget points 2. and 3. . 2. When I delete items from a vault, lets say 15 of the 35 GB then the free space on that vault grows from 50 to 65 GB (sorry to do the simple math here). Fine. 3. But this 15 GB does not show up on my Mac hard drive. If the free capacity was lets say 260 GB before that's what it is after deleting the 15 GB. Ok, maybe my first assumption is incorrect, so I tried to compact the vault to reclaim the space for my hard drive, ( I just did it now), and it tells me that the compaction for the vault was successful. But it will still show up as 85 GB available and 65 free. So in order to reclaim space I have to create a whole new vault that is now lets say 50 GB in size and move everything over and delete the old 85 GB vault?



Regards,

Wassili

Santa1900

Ok, I erased the free space on my hard drive rewriting it seven times, and the freed up storage space appears on my hard drive now. Haven't tried rewriting it just once. Hope this works as well.

MikeT

Hi Santa,



When you delete files, it will not automatically decrease the size of the vault, the vault expands on its own but it can't shrink on its own, no matter how many times you delete files or empty the trash. A manual compact is always required to reduce the size of the vault .



Also, you have to empty the trash while the vault is mounted. When the vault is closed and the trash is being emptied, the trash for the vault is inaccessible and can't be emptied until the vault is opened first and then another trash emptying process begins.



So, the correct process to compact the vault is open the vault, delete the files and then empty the Trash. Do not eject the vault at any moment, now tell Knox to compact the vault for you.



I hope that helps, please let me know how it turns out.

jimvee

I've done this with one of my vaults - it's completely empty now, no files. After compacting it's still 500mb though - seems a bit big to me.. Is that the best I can hope for? Can I manually delete the vault file from finder? Thanks

MikeT

Hi Jim,



Am I correct to assume the vault has been created with a fixed size or was it created to be expandable to your drive? The 500mb sounds right for a huge size limit, it needs to reserve some space to allow it to expand.



If you don't want the vault, yes, you can just trash the vault file and start a new one whenever you need one.

jimvee

Hi Mike, thanks for your reply. Infact no, my vault was about 80gb. I deleted all content then emptied the recycle bin. The vault appears empty but the file size is still 50gb. I expected much smaller.. Is there anything else I can do , or should I simply delete and start a new one?

MikeT

Hi Jim,



When you emptied the Trash bin, you did go to Knox to compact the vault after that, right?



Open Knox from its Menu Bar > Preferences, go to Vaults, select the empty vault and press "Compact Vault". Wait until it is done, it should definitely compact it to less than 1GB or smaller.