What are Mac users to do when we start running short on storage space? The options are essentially the same ones I faced after leaving my first apartment: Get rid of things that you don't need, find ways to make things fit into less space, and spend money for extra storage. This article looks at how to apply those techniques to your Mac. The various system processes of Mac OS X need a certain amount of free disk space to function at their best, and an overfilled hard drive can actually slow down your Mac.
Whether you're cleaning out your closet or your Mac's hard drive, the easiest solution is to get rid of stuff that you don't need anymore.
While it may be easy to look through your closet and pick out the clothes you don't wear, the process of choosing files to remove from your hard drive is a bit more difficult. Two factors can make this type of "data housecleaning" difficult:.
The first place to begin looking is at things that you've put on the Mac yourself. This category includes music you've downloaded, photos and videos you've captured, various types of other documents that you've either created or added over the years, and applications that you've installed or, in some cases, ones that came with your Mac. Looking through your home folder, you can probably get a sense of which documents you need or want to keep, which you no longer need at all, and which you need to keep but don't open regularly.
That last group can be archived by burning them to CD or DVD, allowing you to keep them for later reference but get them off your hard drive. Likewise, you can look through your Mac's Applications folder and decide whether you need each of the applications in there. Of course, you can do this process entirely by hand, opening each folder and checking the size of the documents within it file sizes are included in the Finder's List View.
This approach allows you to start at the root level of your home directory and check each folder, drilling down through levels of folders only for those that seem to contain a large amount of data.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with checking each individual folder, and actually it can be helpful for you to look through your Mac for files that you may have forgotten about over time. I try to do this whenever I upgrade to a new Mac, before running the Migration Assistant and moving everything over from my old Mac. In addition to finding forgotten files, this process can help me to reduce the amount of stuff that needs to be transferred, which saves time.
Unfortunately, this process can be pretty time-consuming. Housekeeping may be a good idea in general, but if you're trying to recover space, you really need to give priority to larger items or collections of items. For example, I still have a folder with various papers, projects, and reference material from my college days. I don't look at it very often, but since it only takes about 25MB, I'm not going to gain much space by tossing it.
On the other hand, a forgotten MB GarageBand project from a few months ago is a big deal, as is a series of promotional materials I created as a favor for someone, using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and In Design, that requires nearly 2GB for storing both raw and finished data.
One of my favorite features of Drive Genius which I recently highlighted in my overview of Mac hard drive tools is Drive Slim , which allows me to search for files that are over a specified size and that haven't been accessed in a set time period.
This feature makes it very quick and easy to spot files that are unused and taking up space, but it doesn't always give you a good overview of what's filling up your hard drive. For that purpose, there are three good products that give you a bird's-eye view of your entire hard drive, pointing out which folders and files as well as which types of files are consuming the most space:.
All three products let you get more granular details by delving into large folders and then into various subfolders. WhatSize and DaisyDisk are particularly good at helping you to visualize the space used on your drive s ; both WhatSize and OmniDiskSweeper integrate the ability to delete files directly from their interface. Both Drive Genius and WhatSize also have other tricks to reclaim space.
I'll discuss those features later in this article. Recovering disk space used by various system and application files can seem like a risky idea, particularly if you're not very familiar with the folders and files that run Mac OS X.
However, a number of files that you may not need take up a fair amount of space, as you'll quickly be able to tell with any of the tools I just mentioned. The following sections detail some places to look for files that take up a lot of space and yet are generally safe to remove.
As always, make sure that you have a recent backup before you start deleting files, in case you encounter issues and need to restore something. Removing unused applications is an obvious way to recover disk space, particularly if the applications came preinstalled on your computer or were migrated from a previous Mac using Apple's Migration Assistant.
You also may have unused programs from software suites that bundle together a number of applications, such as Microsoft Office or part of Adobe's Creative Suite line. In addition to applications, third-party preference panes which appear in System Preferences , screensavers, and Dashboard widgets can take up space even if you're not using them.
These items all live in different places on your hard drive. Applications can live in the Applications folder at the root level of your startup drive if installed for all users or in the Applications folder in your home folder or the home folders of other user accounts. Similarly, preference panes, screensavers, and widgets can reside either in the Library folder at the root level of your hard drive or the in the Library folder in your home folder or the home folder of other users.
Simply deleting an application can reclaim disk space, but many applications have supporting files that are either installed with the application or are created the first time someone opens the program. These extra files typically include preferences files that define any user or system-related settings for the application and application support files. Preferences files rarely take up much space, but still can be worth removing. Since each user will have preferences for an application, these files are stored inside the Preferences folder in the Library folder in each user's home folder.
They may be stored in folders or files named specifically for the application, or most frequently in files with a more archaic name structure such as com. This format identifies the developer of the application followed by the name of the application itself, and is used for applications that directly follow Apple's current accepted practice of storing preferences as XML data in a property list file hence the.
Some applications may also have system-wide preferences files stored in the Preferences folder inside the Library folder at the root level of your hard drive. In addition to preferences files, many applications make use of additional support files.
These files can extend or add features to applications, define global settings, provide additional utilities used only from within the application, or include additional features such as help files or introductory videos. Such support files are typically stored in the Application Support folder inside the Library folder most often the Library folder at the root level of your hard drive, making them available to all users, but sometimes also in your home folder or the home folders of other users.
The Application Support folder s is organized with subfolders for each developer or each application. For example, Adobe applications have separate folders inside the Adobe folder. In some cases, even applications that you use regularly may include collections of supporting files in their Application Support folders that you don't need.
For example, GarageBand stores downloaded "Learn to Play" lessons as well as additional loops if installed in the Application Support folder for all users the one in the Library folder at the root level of your hard drive. Although application support and preferences files are not deleted with applications by default, tools are available that can act as uninstallers, removing all associated files along with an application.
I'll profile those tools at the end of this section. Many applications come with Read Me and manual files that are installed by default. Using Spotlight to search for Read Me files or all PDF files can help you to locate manuals and guide files stored in other locations. You may never have even looked at many of these files, and you probably don't need them. In the case of PDF manuals, these files can actually be quite large, so removing them can free a sizable amount of space.
When you receive email with attachments, Mail automatically downloads the attachments and stores them in the Mail Downloads folder inside the Library folder in your home folder. If you regularly receive a large number of email messages with large attachments, deleting messages you no longer need can save space. Any items you download from a site by using a web browser are stored there. Other applications capable of downloads, including some email clients and FTP applications, may also store downloads there.
To avoid malware and viruses, you probably open these files after downloading them; generally, you shouldn't leave a browser set to open files automatically. For software installers or disk images, you may use them and then forget about them afterward. This practice can lead to a lot of unneeded space being used in this folder, making it a great place to check periodically to see if you really need all those files.
Apple provides a number if developer tools along with every copy of Mac OS X. These aren't installed by default not every Mac user is a developer , but when they're installed they tend to follow an all-or-nothing approach. Disk Inventory X gives you both, so you're in good shape regardless of what you prefer. It provides all the information you'll need, in multiple ways, when analyzing your disk space. It isn't exactly a pretty app like Daisy Disk, mentioned in the competition section and the amount of information it provides might be overwhelming for some users at first.
That said, these are very minor complaints. For the most part, Disk Inventory X should handle just about everything you'd want out of a disk space analyzer. It's the preference of many Mac users. What it does differently is display disk usage data as a sunburst map, which some may find easier to read and definitely more pleasant to look at. DaisyDisk is very fast and very pretty.
DaisyDisk is very fast, and shows an overview of all disks connected to the Mac. Changes are updated in real time, making it ideal for analyzing and taking a wise decision on what to delete and what to keep. This tool is very popular amongst IT professionals and artists, which are the most common users of Macs.
Although this is a commercial tool, it has a free trial version available, which can be used to clean up disk space Mac in a casual manner. Overall, DaisyDisk presents an option for analyzing disk space on Mac and deciding where to clean, which is very user friendly and easy to learn, even for the non-technical user.
Although some reviews indicate that the interface appears a bit old, results are presented in an efficient way, by means of a drawer like information display. In general, GrandPerspective presents a good option for the average user, who is looking for a simple tool, which can do a good job in freeing up drive space quite quickly. This app presents an overview of all disks on a machine. The results are presented in a graphical way called tree map.
The tree map shows the files and folders coded by type, and showing the sizes and amount of files contained in each folder, inclusive of subfolders.
The size of each file in a folder is also specified. In addition, more information about specific data is available, when the user clicks on an item on the map. The data can also be presented in an organized list, with files and folders displayed according to their size, from the largest to the smallest one.
Disk Inventory X provides the user with the capacity to analyze an entire drive, or just a selected folder. The main characteristics of this application are its ease of use, and friendly data presentation.
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