Tips for cleaning out the HD

Question

Level 1

8 points

Tips for cleaning out the HD

I have an older 60 gig Air, and it's just about out of storage space. I think I'm sitting at around 2 gigs left. I have a program I want to install that needs a lot more than that. Can I install it on my external HD and still run it on the Air. If not, where am I getting bogged down with storage issues? All of my data (music, pictures, videos, documents) are all stored on my external. With the exception of some Adobe products (Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Reader) and Firefox, I haven't installed an outside program on this at all. Where am I getting bogged down and how can I clean this up? I did some research on upgrading the flash storage, but that seems like it's a no-no. Any help would be greatly appreacited.

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.5), 2GB Memory 60GB HD

Posted on Dec 25, 2013 10:13 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Dec 25, 2013 11:34 AM in response to binger19

See here for answer about the OTHER which is taking up space:

http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

and here:

http://pondini.org/OSX/DiskSpace.html

See Kappys excellent note on the rest of “other” files taking up your space:

What is "Other" and What Can I Do About It?

In the case of a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro Retina with ‘limited’ storage on the SSD, this distinction becomes more important in that in an ever rapidly increasing file-size world, you keep vital large media files, pics, video, PDF collections, music off your SSD and archived on external storage, for sake of the necessary room for your system to have free space to operate, store future applications and general workspace. You should never be put in the position of considering “deleting things” on your macbook SSD in order to ‘make space’.

Professionals who create and import very large amounts of data have almost no change in the available space on their computers internal HD because they are constantly archiving data to arrays of external or networked HD.

Or in the case of the consumer this means you keep folders for large imported or created data and you ritually offload and archive this data for safekeeping, not only to safeguard the data in case your macbook has a HD crash, or gets stolen, but importantly in keeping the ‘breathing room’ open for your computer to operate, expand, create files, add applications, for your APPS to create temp files, and for general operation.

Reply

Answer 2

hands4

Level 4

2,246 points

Dec 26, 2013 1:41 PM in response to binger19

It sounds like you have been managing the disk space on your small 64 GB SSD for a while. Here are some additional hints for finding disk space.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5688140?answerId=24205522022#24205522022

It is not a “no-no” to upgrade the SSD to 120 GB or more. OWC (macsales.com) sells 120 GB SSDs for older MacBook Airs from $120 to $185 (and larger ones for more money). http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/

You will want your Model Identifier which you can find by going to

 > About This Mac > More Info… > System Report… > Model Identifier:

Reply