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Reco for Mac Laptops

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Problem: OSX 10.6.3 on a battery powered laptop automatically reserves a sleep image file at the same size of your ram for hybernation. This effectively reduces your available HD space by the amount of ram you have installed -- which can be a significant percentage of your drive space on the newer laptops with 8G ram and smaller SSDs.

Since this file is reserved on the active OS and nothing is actually in it (until you hibernate) you cannot access the space even though it may be nothing. You will notice your main OS is larger than an OS clone if you have one, because once cloned reserves are inactive and if they are empty they register at basically zero size. I do keep a clone of my OS on my laptop and this difference in sizes drove me nuts until I found what was causing it. This sleep file is hidden, and resides in /Private/VAR/VM. If you remove the sleep file, it will simply rebuild the moment you next sleep or reboot. The only way to control it is to run a terminal command to permanently remove it, or download a nifty app.

That app is SmartSleep 2.4, http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/smartsleep.html. SmartSleep loads in system prefs and gives you about 4 sleep options, one being "Sleep Only." When you choose that one, you'll also get a button that allows you to nuke the sleep file which you want to do, and presto, you just gained 8 gigs of desktop space! Now however, your MBP will behave like a desktop at a power failure -- IOW you'll lose everything you're working on if you haven't saved it. Nice thing about this little app is you can use this preference pane to toggle back and forth between sleep modes depending on your needs at the time, but of course any of the other options have a hibernate contingency, will create that sleep file and you'll lose the space until you go back to "Sleep Only" and nuke it.

Very highly recommended! :thumbs:

Jack
 

PeterL

Member
Perhaps not as spiffy, but in the terminal:

sudo pmset hibernatemode 0
rm /var/vm/sleepimage

will accomplish the same. You can type 'man pmset' to learn more. If you're comfortable with this kind of unix stuff :).

Cheers, -Peter
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
That's the terminal option I was referring to. However, nice thing about this little app is it is all-in-one, no need to learn/remember terminal code ;)
 
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