State Auditor| Office Works | Technology | Devices
172 GB free space and still out of Memory?
A Tale of Laptop Nightmares
You just recently bought a new Apple laptop.
Sleek, fresh, and anew.
The moment you migrated your documents from your previous Apple device, voila! documents, photos, and folders devoured your memory space. Sweet riddance, you got luckily marked ineligible for IOS laptop updates with a 4 GB memory left in space.
How could this happen when your previous Apple device had a memory of 172 GB of free space? What could be different?
If you have encountered the same problem as me, you might want to know the rest of the tale.
In my case, after finding no solutions from the web, we finally consulted the matter to Apple stores.
We tried reaching out from a Power Mac Center downtown. The staff just simply scanned over the device with a disinterested look painted all over his eyes and in a matter of minutes proudly directed us to visit the service center instead. (I happened to always have a bad service experience with this store, not a warmth of welcome even when you are to buy, maybe they happened to just a bad day or what but nevertheless, I don’t take it to the heart).
Here comes another dilemma, when we finally reached the service center, the security personnel stopped us as their internet connection is disrupted (Third world problems).
Imagine being initially denied and having to face rejection twice on the same day.
We insisted on simply inquiring which she eventually granted and if you think it ends there, of course not. Here comes the third hurdle, the waiting queue. We waited for hours for our turn and while explaining my troubles, the service staff just simply nodded giving me no definite answers. After scanning over my device, the staff sought help from another employee, and guess what she advised? “You have to reformat your laptop”.
The rejection, the trouble, and the absence of adept personnel honestly made me feel drained. I wasted so much time. I knew there was something wrong but it does not tantamount to a reboot. So we just went home and at nightime I pondered over the device and searched more on the web but still to no avail.
I tried exploring for the nth time the unit and finally had the solution to all my troubles. If you have the same case as me, let me free you from all the waste of time.
1.) Have you recently migrated files from a previous device to your new laptop?
If YES, proceed to Number 2.
2.) Do you have a Dropbox?
If YES again, its frankly the major contributing factor.
You forgot one simple thing, “Save documents online”.
I already made sure that the settings were made to “Save documents online” however, the setting only applies to new documents. Basically, Dropbox only “saves online” the recent files and NOT THE EXISTING ONES.
The problem is, whenever you migrate files from a previous laptop, all of those documents, photos, and data are internally saved eating up all your memory. All you have to do is to manually, one by one, set them to “Online-only”.
I simply right-clicked every folder and clicked the “MAKE ONLINE-ONLY”.
3.) For the final step, I made sure that my laptop won’t turn off for Dropbox to continuously migrate them online.
I couldn’t imagine if I had listened to the service center. Had I followed her advice to reformat the device, I am certain to encounter the same trouble again.
Problem solved!
I am not an expert in technology, just the mere thought of it made me feel outdated, I know somewhere, someone like me could have encountered the same trouble and I would be glad to be of help.
Thanks for reading this far!
