I am running out of space on my hard drive and have an external drive. I want to be able to store my emails on the external drive seamlessly. I want them to appear in mammal, but when I store them I want them to automatically go to the external drive. I also want to be able to manipulate them as I do now. I don't want a mirrored drive, though, as that will not alleviate my storage issues.
Hi,
Usually, mail is the first space hogger but then Music, Movies, Documents, Pictures all consume large amounts of disk space.
Below is a link with tips to move them all which should suit.
Ensure though that your backups include these directories on the external drive.
User Tip: Creating a lean, fast Boot Drive
Cheers
Technically, it is possible. You can move the (normally in the hidden Library folder) Mail folder to another volume, make a symlink (NOT alias) of it, move the symlink back to the Mail folder, and name the symlink "Mail" so that OS X doesn't think it's missing. This would let them appear in Mail and be editable normally.
But you should only do that if the above statement doesn't seem intimidating to you. Because it is an advanced technique and you will have to know how to resolve special cases like when the volume is offline or when system updates occur and change the setup. So if you don't understand any parts of the first sentence, I would not recommend doing it.
Instead, use the suggestion you got earlier. Unless you have very large attachments that you never remove, thousands of mail messages take up less space than just a few videos or music albums. You'll find it easier to free up space by properly managing your media, because deleting just one HD movie you don't need could free up space for a decade of email.
Thanks! One of the suggestions is to move the home drive to the external drive, so I might look in to that.
My system is not letting me copy or drag and drop the home file to the external drive. Any suggestions?
Download OmniDiskSweeper (free)
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper/
This will identify the large files on your drive.
It's easy to move both iPhoto and iTunes libraries to an external drive. After moving hold down Option key when opening and select the library file on external drive. Delete the library files from internal and empty the trash.
Mail is going to work best if you don't move this folder.
I need to clarify, this is a work computer and I don't have any music, videos or pictures. I have 12G of mail and had .5G of downloads (which were basically just duplicates, so I deleted them). I need to keep my mail in account folders and readily accessible. Basically, the file attachments are probably what's taking up all the space. I know that I can remove the attachments, but don't really want to take the time to do it. I really just want my mail folders to reside on the external drive so that they don't take up all my internal HD space.
czani64 wrote:
Basically, the file attachments are probably what's taking up all the space. I know that I can remove the attachments, but don't really want to take the time to do it.
It shouldn't take any time. Create a Smart Mailbox that will match and list only messages with attachments. Select all of those and use the Remove Attachments command.
It should take about 30 seconds to do all of that. And since the Smart Mailbox is saved, next time you need to clean out attachments just open it, Select All, Remove Attachments.
That sounds really easy! But won't the smart mailbox move all the messages from their current account folders into the new smart mailbox? That won't work, because I need to keep the emails in their respective account folders….
Smart folders do not move the messages. A Smart folder is a view of the messages using the criteria you set for the folder.
Just to clarify, Smart Folders are in the Finder and Smart Mailboxes are in the Mail program, but they are based on the same idea. They list items matching criteria and it is just a list, in that the items still live in all their original locations. This makes it easy to create a smart mailbox that is a live saved search across multiple mail folders or multiple mail accounts.
I have Smart Mailboxes for all messages with attachments, all flagged messages, all unread messages, all messages from a specific company, etc. anything that is important to me for housekeeping.
For example, when I make a Smart Mailbox for "all messages where the sender contains ____.com" that generates a list of all messages from that company, so I can grab them across all mailboxes and in a single drag, drop them into a regular mail folder where they are permanently archived. So while generating the Smart Mailbox message list is virtual and does not change the original messages, actions you do to the messages in the Smart Mailbox do affect the messages themselves.
czani64 wrote:
My system is not letting me copy or drag and drop the home file to the external drive. Any suggestions?
- Check the external drive is formatted as OS X Extended (Journaled)
- Ensure the external drive is not enabled for " Ignore ownership to this volume "
- The guide is referenced on many posts. My preference is to perform this with a cloning tool, Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.
Info. in case for the future, Cheers
Network 23
I did as you suggested and maybe it's because there are 9K messages, but it didn't seem to remove the attachments. I then tried just selecting 5 or so attachments, and it didn't remove them either. I am merely highlighting them, not opening each attachment. It only seems to work if I actually open each message and remove the attachment that way. As you can imagine, at 9K messages, that's not a task I'm relishing.
What am I doing wrong?
cz
- Check the external drive is formatted as OS X Extended (Journaled). it is but it doesn't say OS X Extended, just Mac OS extended
- Ensure the external drive is not enabled for " Ignore ownership to this volume " How do I verify this. that wording doesn't appear anywhere
- The guide is referenced on many posts. My preference is to perform this with a cloning tool, Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. Which guide? I don't have Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.
Also, though I like the idea of having my external drive hold all the files and my internal drive be the boot drive, I am backing up to the external drive, so having it be the actually drive kind-of defeats the purpose.
czani64 wrote:
Network 23
I did as you suggested and maybe it's because there are 9K messages, but it didn't seem to remove the attachments. I then tried just selecting 5 or so attachments, and it didn't remove them either. I am merely highlighting them, not opening each attachment. It only seems to work if I actually open each message and remove the attachment that way. As you can imagine, at 9K messages, that's not a task I'm relishing.
What am I doing wrong?
I'm not sure...it's always worked for me to just select messages and do Message > Remove Attachments. I don't know if it works differently with different email providers or different protocols (POP vs IMAP vs MS Exchange vs...)
storing email on external drive to save space
