How do I scan and clean up my hard drive?

Libbymom,

Welcome to the Apple Discussions!

In addition to Motoxxbiker's tip on Repair Permissions, if you normally shut down an OS X Mac overnight or leave it in system sleep, the cron maintenance tasks cannot run in their nominal 3 am timeframe. (Display-only sleep allows the maintenance tasks to run). Tiger 10.4.2 and later will force the maintenance tasks to run after sufficient time has elapsed (at least that's the theory; the actual timing of the forcce maintenance run is in some dispute). Otherwise, you can leave the Mac in display-only sleep a weekend or two a month; you can manually Force Background Maintenance; or you can use a third-party utility such as OnyX to run the maintenance. Note that any system utility you use must be compatible with the OS version (e.g., use the Tiger version of OnyX with 10.4.x).

Also refer to Gulliver - OS X System maintenance and also to Travis A. - Regular Maintenance / General Troubleshooting.

How much free space is there on the hard drive? Anything below 5 GB is cause for wariness; below 1 GB you need to start deleting unneeded user data files, celaring caches, and if necessary get an external Firewire HD and move things like iPhoto and iTunes libraries to the external HD.

If you select the hard drive icon and do Get Info on it, does your 38 GB HD report having around 37.5 GB of files on it? If there's a major discrepancy between the collective sizes of all files on the hard rrive and the amount of free space reported, check for disk directory corruption by booting from the OS X Install disk and running Repair Disk, as described in Using Disk Utility and fsck. If there are direcetory problem, the version of DIsk Utility with OS X 10.2.x is not particularly powerful; you'll want to try DiskWarrior instead (Disk Warrior fixed my eMac's hard drive after something a visiting in-law did someohow managed to leave it with a file in the Trash that claimed to be a 250 GB file on a 40 GB HD).

If the hard rive is OK, start by running the maintenance scripts to free up cache logs space (see How to Force Background Maintenance).

Removing non-used languages can fee up significantr space; keeping just English and Spanish and removing Chinese etc. with Monolingual can free up about 1 GB of hard drive space.

If there are applications you haven't used in years, delete them --- odds are there re severl items fitting this description in thr Applications (OS 9) folder. Extending that, if you haven't run Classic / OS 9 in a year or more, delete the OS 9 System Folder (but don't confude that with the OS X System folder!).

You can add an external Firewire hard drive and move iPhoto and iTunes libraries off the hard drive:
iPhoto: How to move the iPhoto Library Folder
iTunes: Moving your iTunes Music folder

Once you've gotten some breathing room on the hard drive, you can use Whatsize to check for .tmp temprary files left behind (e.fg., from a failed CD-R burn).

JMVP,
You wrote the response below to LibbyMom. I have an eMac running OS 10.2.8. on a 700 MHz Power PC G4 with the 38 GB HD. You wrote below that under 5GB free space is a problem. Even though I have transferred all files I can find to an external HD, there is still only @ 300 MB free space. "Spring Cleaning 8.0" has to run on OS 10.3.9 or newer. Is there another "safe" option to 'cleaning house' on the HD?
Thanx!
Kelly



Libbymom,

Welcome to the Apple Discussions!

In addition to Motoxxbiker's tip on Repair
Permissions, if you normally shut down an OS X Mac
overnight or leave it in system sleep, the cron
maintenance tasks cannot run in their nominal 3 am
timeframe. (Display-only sleep allows the maintenance
tasks to run). Tiger 10.4.2 and later will force the
maintenance tasks to run after sufficient time has
elapsed (at least that's the theory; the actual
timing of the forcce maintenance run is in some
dispute). Otherwise, you can leave the Mac in
display-only sleep a weekend or two a month; you can
manually Force Background
Maintenance; or you can use a third-party utility
such as OnyX to run the maintenance. Note
that any system utility you use must be compatible
with the OS version (e.g., use the Tiger version of
OnyX with 10.4.x).

Also refer to Gulliver - OS X System
maintenance and also to Travis A. - Regular
Maintenance / General Troubleshooting.

How much free space is there on the hard drive?
Anything below 5 GB is cause for wariness; below 1 GB
you need to start deleting unneeded user data files,
celaring caches, and if necessary get an external
Firewire HD and move things like iPhoto and iTunes
libraries to the external HD.

eMac Mac OS X (10.2.x)

Try going into Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. Click on your hard drive.

Click Repair Disk Permissions. See if that helps.

Glad to hear it.