Q: How do I clean up my start up disk?

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.

Apps generally are the worst candidates to delete to clear off disk space.

Far better candidates are movies, videos, music and photos.

You'll need an external drive to remove large files that contain data you want to keep like your iPhoto, iTunes Libraries.

If you get one of the larger 2T or 3T drives you'll be able to create a Time Machine backup and clone. Both are invaluable if/when you need to recover your data.

Having a Time Machine backup and a clone on the same drive is a terrible idea. If the drive fails then you have neither. The Time Machine backup and the clone should be on separate drives. If one drive fails the other should be OK.