HARD DRIVE FULL

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive

1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' Storage Display.

2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.

3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.

4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.

5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.

6. See The Storage Display.

You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.

You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.

Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

I'm assuming you are using Time Machine for backup, and Time Machine is an archival backup utility that keeps adding to a backup until the backup drive becomes full. Other backup utilities have the option to simply overwrite changed files which saves on disk space at the expense of losing older file copies.

You can simply erase the backup drive and start over.

Suggested Backup Software

1. Carbon Copy Cloner

2. Get Backup

3. Deja Vu

4. SuperDuper!

5. Synk Pro

6. Tri-Backup

Others may be found at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.

Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.

No. I'm suggesting you erase your Time Machine backup drive and start the backups over. If you need to rid your internal drive of files to make more space then get a second external drive to use for permanent storage. Place the files you don't need on the internal drive on the external one so you can delete them from the internal drive and gain more free space.

In simple words you need to start managing your data.

Adequate for what?

You only need about 20-30 GBs of free space on the hard drive or 10% of the drive's capacity, whichever is more. But this is not the original subject of your topic, so I'm sort of confused as to where it's going.

You have an internal drive, so erasing the backup is just a short-term risk. If you don't like the risk, then backup the backup to another external drive for safekeeping. You can never have too many backups.