DINC storage management

[aodshark]

I'm hoping for a little help as I stumble around the onboard and SD memory on my phone. (For what it's worth, I'm using a Mac when I connect the phone to a computer.) As I've added and deleted music from my phone by connecting it as a disk drive and doing the old drag/drop, it appears I've blown through all of my storage space--clearly, whenever I delete files through the OSX Finder, it doesn't actually free that space up again on the card or the internal storage. So, a few questions:

1. Do I have this right? I've currently got about 1.5 gigs free on the 8gb SD card, and somewhere around 500mb free on the internal storage, and I've "deleted" (as in, "moved to trash") all of the music I had in either place. I'm clearly deleting files incorrectly, yes?

2. What do I do? I suspect I'll have to format both the card and the internal storage. Or is there another way to resurrect the lost storage space?

3. If I have to format all of the flash memory, what else am I going to lose? What should I save onto my computer first, so that I can drag it back onto the clean storage after the format? I'd like to lose as little as possible, obviously.

Cheers.

[demmo86rt]

You can try defragmenting your card, like you do with your hard drive, but I'm not sure if it's safe to do for onboard storage. When I back up my card, I usually just copy the whole card into a folder on my desktop.

[aodshark · Accepted solution]

I appreciate the reply. Actually, I figured out the issue, and feel quite the fool for not figuring it out sooner. I had to (drumroll) empty my Trash while the phone was mounted in disk mode. Suddenly: all the missing space returned! /facepalm

[demmo86rt]

Well, thanks for posting what you figured out, too many people don't.