Free up Hard Disk space

I would recommend using Onyx rather than cocktail, since it is free. If you use the Cleaning option it really gets rid of all the crud. I have seens system regain over 1GB.
Also, using iPhoto Diet you can remove the embedded thumbnails in images which saves a LOT of space.
Recently I discovered that if you use stuffit to expand a lot of files, it leaves a temp file somewhere which can be the same size as the data you just extracted. This seem to only be removed by rebooting.
Another tip is to look in your /Volumes directory. I once found 100's of megabytes there. It seemed to be a mirror of what had been on a firewire drive that had been unplugged before ejecting. Some program had tried to write to '/Volumes/FireWire/data/'. However since the firewire drive had been removed suddenly, it just created a directory called FireWire/data and wrote it there.

Will

Where can you get iPhoto Diet 2.2? Links to it from both MacUpdate and VersionTracker fail.

For obsessive disk space conservationists, try Atomic Bird's shareware utility Macaroni. It's primary purpose is to run cron tasks at the next available opportunity (when computers are not left on in the wee hours of the morning). The application can also be scheduled to repair permissions and remove localizations.

Or buy 1GB for 1 Dollar !

:-)

use OmniDiskSweeper - with this tool you can see exactly how much a folder is using.

i usually find copies of things and unneeded files worth 5G or more using this tool. it's amazing what kind of stuff you end up collecting when you have a large hard drive.

iPhotodiet can be found here:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/imaging_3d/iphotodiet.html

Thanks for the great comments!

Some readers complained that the links to the mentioned applications are not very reliable, so I decided to mirror the links to download on our own server, hope the developers don't mind:
Delocalizer (484KB)iPhotoDiet (357KB)Also, inspite that on the Delocalizer's page it says it hasn't been tested on 10.3 (Panther), I can confirm that it in fact does work on 10.3, so don't worry.

I wouldn't worry too much about clearing temp files if you shut your Mac down every night. /etc/rc.cleanup should clear anything in /private/tmp, among other things, on startup.

Of course, this left out one of the most obvious ways to finding the large files that *might* have to be removed...

Use the OS X Finder's Find function (under File menu) to find large visible and hidden files. Of course, you have to be aware of what those files do before you remove anything that might effect application or system performance...I don't advise monkeying around with any file if you aren't sure what it does. If big files are found, search for what they might be using your favorite internet search engines or OS X online forum.

--Timbo

Yeah, but the Finder won't always find everything that you want to remove. You would need to login as root in order to do that.

And I really don't recommend that to anyone.

As someone else noted, Omni DiskSweeper is an awesome tool for ferreting out wasted space. I use ODS whenever I want to do a little housekeeping on my Mac.

you can free disk space by removing:
unnecessary voices in system-library:
Speech-voices
Sounds
screen savers
printers: eg lexmark installer puts all possible stuff into this folder, but only a few files are needed
modem scripts
some fonts if you dont need them:
•“•È•Æ•ŒÕË•¥ Pro W4.otf
•“•È•Æ•Œ√˜≥Ø Pro W3.otf
•“•È•Æ•Œ√˜≥Ø Pro W6.otf
•“•È•Æ•ŒΩ«•¥ Pro W3.otf
•“•È•Æ•ŒΩ«•¥ Pro W6.otf
•“•È•Æ•ŒΩ«•¥ Std W8.otf
ª™Œƒœ∏∫⁄.ttf
ª™Œƒ∫⁄ÃÂ.ttf
in core services you may remove:
Setup Assistant.app
replace
Classic Startup.app by a renamed smaller app if you dont need classic.
in Library:
documents:
Acknowledgements.rtf
Commands
Help
iTunes
Libraries
Services
desctop pictures
if you dont have bluuetooth anything that ist concerned with bluetooth.
this should free more than 130 megs of space

care and backup.

Excellent advice on this page, I freed 1.2 Go of space all the tricks posted here which is a lot of freedom for my Imac G3 with a 10 Go drive. Thanks!

Just because you've trashed deleted files in Entourage or Entourage Express doesn't mean they're actually gone. You should occasionally rebuild the databases by launching with the option key down from the Finder (not the Dock). You'll receive several options including compacting and rebuilding the database. It will create a new file in the same folder as your old one so you can see exactly how much you saved. The difference can be huge.

I strongly recommend using using WhatSize to check where all your disk space is going. I found over 2GB of useless files by looking through its size-sorted index of my hard drive.

I have just switched from Win to Mac. I was wondering why I had so much HD space used if I haven't installed almost any App. Then I started to search the Web for some explanations and I found this site. I followed all of your advices and now I have 6.4 Gbs more! WhatSize is awesone, no need for ODS.
Thanks a lot. Greetings from Mexico.

I've got an ibook G4 and iphoto 5.0.4. Does anyone know how to delete photos out of iphoto and simultaneously delete them off the hard drive? I find it annoying when I want to get rid of a photo that I can see in iphoto, but to actually get rid of it I have to go into my finder, find the photo I deleted from iphoto and trash both it *and* the original file *and* the thumbnail, (which has a totally different numbering system), all out of separate folders. If you don't do that, you end up with lots of (bad, eyes-half-closed) pictures that you can't see in iphoto, which are lurking around on the hard drive and taking up space. It sort of defeats the purpose of using iphoto to manage photos at all... I've accidentally gotten rid of the wrong photo in the finder too, and then I can see it fine iphoto until I zoom in and the frame goes white....

Any suggestions? Perhaps there is a way to periodically 'synch' iphoto and the hard drive's photos so that you can actually *see* what pictures you're storing?

Also, is there a way to not have a separate folder for every single day that you've taken a photo? This seems inefficent and ends up creating many (potentially empty) folders. Is there a way to have the harddrive sort photos into single folders for each month instead of each day?

Thanks! (Great article...I've freed up over 6 GB of space so far)