I'm on the way to London with a very important presentation to do at the Architecture in the Age of Austerity conference, but I'm also working on finishing New Media for Designers + Builders plus this companion website. I was also updating my presentations list on all my websites. The rest of the sites updated uneventfully, but the beach ball just continued to spin when I tried to update the Original Green site.
I tried everything I could think of. Nothing worked. Finally, I decided to do a safe reboot by holding down the shift key while restarting. It got to a certain point, then locked up. I tried it again, letting it run for nearly an hour. No dice.
By this time, I was getting terrified. What if something was wrong with my computer? What if I couldn't do my presentation? It could be one of the most important presentations of my life!
But then it occurred to me: this is a 3-year old MacBook Pro, and I'm running very low on disk space, waiting for the next version which is rumored to be out shortly. So, depending on what's running, I might have as little as a gigabyte of space available on my hard drive. I've been getting "disk nearly full" messages all evening. And the Original Green domain file is now over a gig, with all the pictures, video, and pdf files.
So I opened the overhead bin and grabbed one of the external hard drives I carry with me. I had a handful of movies on my Mac… about 12 gigabytes in all. I copied them to the external drive and deleted them from my internal drive.
I went back to Sandvox, opened the Original Green domain file, made my edits, and held my breath as I hit Save. It worked! So the moral of this story is: make sure you always have plenty of disk space available on your startup drive.
