Why is my hard disk so full?

OmniDiskSweeper

GrandPerspective

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

Look in your Utilites folder for Activity monitor, it will show you your drive space in a pie chart too.

beckyfromoz wrote:

I LIKE this! The visual is fantastic. A over half my disk is taken up by backups/home folder dating back for years. Is it safe to delete these? I have been backing up my home folder to a disk every month. Thanks for your help, this is great. If I knew how to insert a screenshot I would show it to you....

All the best,

Becky

Yup!

A few more suggestions:

Empty the trash!

Open up your application folder & go through all your apps. Trash all the apps you no longer want and/or use.

An easier way to do this is to open the Application folder in list view & press the Command+j keys.

In the the dialog that appears, click the "This Window Only" button & the "Calculate All Sizes" check box.

Wait a bit until your file & folder sizes have all been calculated, then click the "Size" column to sort your apps from the fattest to the most anorexic.

Get rid of all your photo files you don't want and/or need. Same goes for those pics off the websites you downloaded (gifs, jpegs, etc.). Or transfer/move them all to a photo/movie storage site like ImageShack and Photobucket, 2 of the most popular FREE storage sites.

Get rid of all your music files you no longer listen too. Especially, if you already have the actual CD/DVDs or you can later redownload from a website. Or transfer them all to a FREE music storage site.

Use Spotlight to make sure you got rid of everything. You can even trash directly from Spotlight!

Drag what you don't want and/or need to the trash. Better yet, download this neat little shareware app *demo* called AppZapper. It basically does all the work for you by not only trashing the apps but the apps preference files, caches & all its associated files.

Another software that does the above is AppDelete. Best of all this software is free!

Burn what you want and/or need onto CDs or DVDs. Not everyone has the luxury of purchasing an external HD and/or Mobile accounts to store their "stuff.”

You can check with your ISP to see if they offer *free* storage space. Most if not all do now-a-days. There are thousands if not millions of *free* storage facilities on the web also. Use your favorite search engine to search them out as they come in different storage sizes to fit your needs & wants.

Check for duplicate fonts.

Applications>Font Book

Select “All Fonts”

If you see any “black dots” next to any fonts this mean you have duplicates and/or multiple versions of these fonts.

To clean this up, select a “black dotted” font or the Apple + *click* to select multiple dotted fonts;

Edit>Resolve>Duplicates.

What the above does is turns off the duplicates & multiple version fonts. Not delete them.

More than likely the “extras” were installed by other programs and/or other users.

Clear out font caches

Use FontNuke. It does all the work for you. And, best of all it’s *FREE*.

Printer Drivers

Get rid of all the printer drivers you don’t need & use except the ones for your *current* printer(s)/scanner(s).

HD>Library>Printers Folder

If you accidently threw something out that you needed for your printer/scanner it can be easily obtained from the manufacturer’s website and/or from the CD that came w/the printer/scanner.

Garage Band

Has about 1GB of loops stored. Get rid of some some them. You surely don’t use, like and/or need them all.

HD>Library>Audio/Apple Loops>Apple>Apple Loops For GarageBand

Or just get rid of the Garage Band app altogether if you don’t use it.

Get rid of extra languages

Strip your computer down to your “native” tongue.

You can do this with a *FREE* utility called Monolingual. Another app that apparently does all the work for you. I’ve never used it. However, a lot of users here swear by & recommend it highly.

However, there is a warning for *native English speakers*. Make sure you keep BOTH English and English (United States).

Other Resources:

HD Space Checkers:

Disk Inventory X (FREE)

WhatSize (SHAREWARE)

OmniDiskSweeper (FREE)

GrandPerspective (FREE - donation)

Slimming your hard drive

Rule of thumb: You should never let your hard drive get to where you have only 10-15% of space left.

A over half my disk is taken up by backups/home folder dating back for years. Is it safe to delete these?

That depends. You certainly shouldn't have backups on the same disk you're backing up. Those belong on an external hard drive, or in the cloud. If you have no other backups, then copy them before deleting.

beckyfromoz wrote:

Is it safe to delete these? I have been backing up my home folder to a disk every month.

Get yourself a external powered USB drive (750GB -1TB drives cost about $120 now) from your local office/computer store and simply drag and drop those folder to copy to the external drive.

Once that's done then you can trash the originals. You never know when you need to go back or delete something by accident.

The TimeMachine is going to popup, you don't want to do this for this purpose, so cancel that. You can use another drive for TimeMachine as it just keeps a recent copy of your entire boot drive, it doesn't save extra files like what your doing with the first external drive.

beckyfromoz wrote:

If I knew how to insert a screenshot I would show it to you....

All you have to do is hit 'command shift 4' and your mouse pointer turns into a cross hair which you click once to start, then drag a box around what you want to take a picture off and then click again.

If you want to take a screen shot of your entire screen you use command shift 3 instead.

On your desktop will be a file, which you use the camera thingy in the forum here to select and upload from your comptuer. 🙂