How do I free up space on my startup disk (SSHD) and move apps to my HD 2

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How do I free up space on my startup disk (SSHD) and move apps to my HD 2

This is a 2 part question: I have a 250 GB SSHD and a 2 terabyte HD 2 on my iMac. All of my apps seems to run off of, and save to, my SSHD. My SSHD fills up rather quickly due to design work and video editing, also my desktop saves onto my SSHD.

1. I recently free'd approx 100 GB of space on my SSHD (250 GB), deleted all of my trash, save all of my work onto my External Hard Drive, etc. Yet my SSHD has filled up again and is almost at full capacity. When I check my files to find out what is taking up this space, and I add all of the file space together from everything that shows as available on my SSHD, they collectively add up to approx 150 GB. I should have at least 100GB available, yet my SSHD is showing that its nearly full. I even removed 15 GB of data this morning, and it is only showing 9 available. Is there something wrong with my hard drive.

2. How do move items like my desktop, Google Drive, Dropbox, and my apps that do not require my SSHD, to run to my HD 2, so that I can save this memory for applications like Final Cut, Photoshop, and Lightroom. I have already moved iTunes and iPhoto to the 2 terabyte hard drive to free up space.

iOS 4.3.3

Posted on Mar 27, 2015 10:50 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 27, 2015 11:00 AM in response to deuceemr

The vast majority of applications must reside on the same disk drive as the the system. They need to be store in either the Applications folder at root or in Home.

Another fallacy to your plan is that generally the disk space taken up by the applications themselves is small in comparison to the data they use.

My suggestion is to look at the data and see what is taken the most space such as music, video and photos. Once you find that then move the data to the external disk drive.

I would recommend against moving Desktop or Home to the external drive.

Neither Google Drive nor Dropbox should be taking any disk drive space on your Mac since they are both cloud technology.

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Mar 27, 2015 11:02 AM in response to deuceemr

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.

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