Digi Scrap Mac: Reclaim Your Hard Drive Capacity

From Reclaim Your Hard Drive Capacity
By Ed, ed@smalldog.com

Evaluate your data usage; you may discover dozens of gigabytes of obsolete data (TV shows, music, duplicate photos) that could safely be deleted and never missed. This article explores the next level of reclaiming hard drive space. Pruning away unneeded languages and printer drivers, cleaning up random multimedia files, and trashing unneeded application assets can easily free up more than 10GB of hard drive space.

IMPORTANT: I strongly suggest that your Mac is completely backed up before you start deleting files. It's easy to make a mistake and delete something you really wanted to keep. Also, never delete a file if you don't understand its function. Only delete files if you are confident you understand what it does, and does not do. Except where noted, the recommendations below are safe, easy, and well tested.

1. Eliminate Unnecessary Languages
The default installation of Mac OS X includes dozens and dozens of language files, including Bislama, Aymara, Guarani, Inukitut, Manx, Greecelandic, and even Klingon. Most of these will never be used by the average Mac user, but they still take up hundreds to even thousands of megabytes of disk space.

The easiest way to delete these languages is by using a program such as Monolingual (free) to remove everything except for the five English language modules and the other popular languages you may need in real life, or expect to come across online (French, German, Japanese, etc). Again, deleting these languages can free up to 2 gigabytes on some installations of OS X. However, as far as I have been able to determine, the only way to reinstall languages is via a complete reinstall (or archive and install) of OS X.

IMPORTANT: Be very careful not to accidently remove the English language files, even if you don't speak, read, or write English.
Note that these languages are not for the translation of one language to another, but for displaying languages. If you visit a webpage written in Klingon, and you've erased Klingon from your Mac, the page will not display correctly. Monolingual has an option to remove system architectures and input menus, but I don't recommend this. The return megabytes are paltry, and this is a bit riskier than simply erasing unused languages.

2. Wipe Out Unneeded Printer Drivers
By default, most Macs with 10.4 and 10.5 have over 3GB of printer drivers installed on them. Sometimes this is great, because it allows most printers to "just work" with OS X without further software installation. However, if you only use one or two printers, there's really no need to have all those drivers. Also, unlike languages, most printer drivers can be easily downloaded from the internet. I've manually deleted many of these unneeded drivers by navigating to Macintosh HD > Library > Printers and dragging the unneeded drivers to the Trash. I made it easy by only dragging folders with printer brands I don't use to the Trash. I use Canon, Epson, and Xerox, as well as Macromedia; most of the rest were trashed (Lexmark, Samsung, SAVIN, etc.) Some people suggest it's safer to use Printer Setup Repair (Tiger and Panther only) because manually deleting the wrong printer file can damage Mac OS X's printing system. See Printer Setup Repair here:

http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/psr/ Again, don't ever delete anything on your Mac unless you are confident that you have an excellent back up, and that you know what you are doing.

3. Nuke Unneeded Applications
Most applications hog surprisingly little hard drive space. It's the files created or stored by the applications that tend to actually gobble hard drive space. For example, the iTunes application is only about 38MB, but the iTunes library of music stored by iTunes is usually several gigabytes or more. Likewise the iDVD app is only about 116MB, while a single DVD created by it can easily be over 10GB. Even if they're small, you might as well delete applications you never use.

You should especially delete the trial versions of software that you may have downloaded to evaluate, but now never use. AppZapper, the maker of an excellent app remover writes: "You'd think it would be that easy to delete an app - just a matter of dragging it to the trash. But it's not. Applications install preferences, caches, and other support files throughout your computer that take up space and generate clutter. Deleting these by hand every time you delete an app is a pain." Get AppZapper here: http://www.appzapper.com/ Use free for 5 apps. I like AppCleaner; it's free and easy. http://www.freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/ A new program called AppDelete is now on the scene. I've also used this and like it quite a bit. It's simple, and it's free. It's not as easy to use as AppZapper, but is worth trying: http://reggie.ashworth.googlepages.com/appdelete

Not all applications are small; for example, iWeb weighs in at more than 300MB due to its complicated (and admittedly attractive) templates. Here's another tip: if you've decided not to use the free trial version of Apple's Pages and Keynote programs in the iWork folder in your Applications folder, you should delete it. The application and templates take up to 1.3GB of drive space. Many of those megabytes are assets and effects for Keynote.

4. Eradicate Unneeded Application Assets
As mentioned above, it's often the assets associated with an application that take up hard drive space. In many cases, you might want or need these assets. Very often, however, the assets are simply larding your drive with filler.

Here are a few tips for taking control of these assets:

Photos, video, and music files take up the most disk space.

A typical iTunes music file takes up about 4MB.

A typical photo (uploaded from your own camera) is about 1.5MB (photos from emails are typically much smaller).

A one-hour TV show from the iTunes Store takes up from 90MB - 250MB.

In iTunes, easy targets include old podcasts (especially video podcasts), music videos, and TV shows you're never going to watch again.

Next, delete iTunes duplicates:
In iTunes, go to View > Show Duplicates to show all tracks with identical names. You can then go through and delete the tracks just as you'd delete any iTunes song. There is a catch: "Show Duplicates" reveals tracks that share the same title, but are actually different tracks. Make sure you are deleting the correct copy by reading the artist and album name along with song title. You can also try Wooden Brain Concepts' iDupe ($8), which scans track names and other data to more easily identify duplicates: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/27060

In iPhoto, begin by deleting multiple versions of the same photo. Digital cameras make it easy to take many nearly-identical photos; people will often take ten shots of the same scene. Keep the two to four best shots and delete the rest. iPhoto is a huge space hog because it retains backup copies of every photo that you edit, including simple edits such as rotation and cropping. This why you can always "revert" to your original photo, no matter how many times you edit it. This can easily gobble many gigabytes of hard drive space.

For versions of iPhoto before iPhoto 7, you can use iPhoto Diet to delete backup copies of all your photos: http://www.rhythmiccanvas.com/software/iphotodiet/

For iPhoto 5, 6, and 7, try Brattoo Propaganda's Duplicate Annihilator, which costs $8.00. Again, don't run these programs unless you have an excellent backup, and you know what you're doing.

Here's another useful-to-know gotcha: when you delete a photo in iPhoto, it's actually moved to iPhoto's Trash. To truly erase your photos, and reclaim your hard drive space, don't forget to empty iPhoto's trash. In iPhoto, browse to iPhoto > Empty Trash.

iMovie also has a redundant Trash. Many people who use iMovie are shocked that there are literally gigabytes of old, deleted movie clips stored there. Also in iMovie, if you are finished editing a movie, burn the project file to DVD or movie the project file to and external drive. As long as the project file is backed up, you can edit it later. iMovie projects can take up many dozens of gigabytes.

If you never use GarageBand, and never plan to, you should delete your GarageBand loops. You'll reclaim 3.7GB. Go to Macintosh HD > Library > Application Support > GarageBand and delete everything in there except the .plist file (preference file).

Then, browse to Macintosh HD > Library > Audio > Loops > Apple Loops for GarageBand and move it to the Trash. If you know you'll never need iLife Sound Effects for iMovie, you can also trash that file. Note that it's easy to move the GarageBand loops to an external drive for future use. MacWorld.com has a great article about how to do this: http://www.macworld.com/article/54120/2006/11/movegbloops.html -

Dashboard widgets can be quite large.
Simply deactivating a Widget in Dashboard's control pane does not delete it, but simply hides it for later use.
Browse to Macintosh HD > Library > Widgets to find the Widget folder. Drag unneeded Widgets into the Trash, then empty the Trash to actually get rid of the Widget forever (or until you download it from the internet again). If you've downloaded additional widgets, they may reside here... Users > Documents > Widgets. Go through and clean out.

Screensavers can also take also take up a fair amount of hard drive space. First preview them all in the System Prefs then trash the screensavers you never use. They can appear in two places.
Macintosh HD > Library > Screen Savers
Macintosh HD > Users > Library > Screen Savers

Place seldom-used applications (and application disk images and installers) on an external drive for future use.

5. Misc Tips/Extra Credit: Empty Trash
Don't forget to actually empty Trash. Many people move files to the Trash, but since they never empty it, all those files are simply sitting there.

- Use a Finder search or a utility like CleanApp to identify files you haven't used in a long time. If you haven't touched a file in a year, archive it to external media and delete the original.

- Purge Your Downloads folder. Burn any downloaded installers and disk-image files you may need later to CD or DVD, then Trash them out of your browser's Downloads folder. Most installers can simply be trashed without burning to disk, because you can always download them from the web later.

- Delete excess & obsolete email. I prefer to keep all copies of my email on my Mac. I personally have to look up old emails daily. However, my accumulated mail messages take up gigabytes of space. If you never need to refer to old emails, you can either delete your old email or use a program such as Pubblog.com's MailSteward ($50) to archive older messages to external media or another computer. Note that email attachments can hog lots of hard drive space. In OS X Mail, you can remove attachments from saved or sent messages by selecting one or more messages and choosing Message > Remove Attachments.

- Every few months, scan your Documents folder associated subfolders, and delete any items you no longer need.

- Periodically clear cache files. Many applications, as well as OS X itself, cache data to improve their performance. Over time, these caches can grow huge, slowing performance and devouring disk space. The applications that created the cache files regenerate them automatically, so you can usually delete cache files without fear. Many cache files are stored in Library > Caches and your user folder > Library > Caches. To automate cache cleaning, use a program such as Maintain's Cocktail ($15): http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php Or Onyx (free): http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20070

- Use Xslimmer to trim fat code and gain speed from applications: http://www.xslimmer.com/

- Finally, you can compress files that you rarely use but want to keep. Select a file or folder and choose File . Create Archive Of file name. Then delete the original, uncompressed item. Use Allume's StuffIt Deluxe to create even smaller file archives.

7. Visualize Where It Goes
If you're inexplicably still missing gigabytes, run a program like GrandPerspective. It's a free, open source application that analyzes your hard drive and gives you a graphical representation of where all your space has gone. If you find something you don't need, you can click the Reveal button to see it in Finder, or even simply hit Delete and send it packing.

Additionally, you can drill down on directories to get a closer look at the smaller files, which you can probably tell seem minuscule next to the big boys. http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ Similar to GrandPerspective, WhatSize is a shareware app that shows you exactly how much space files and folders are taking up on your Mac. It offers a file size column in a Finder-like interface. Hidden files, cache files, directories will all show up with their corresponding size. Use it for free to measure up to 20GB of data, or purchase a license for $12.99 to measure any volume, have access to the System Administrator functionality and support development of new features: http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/

Disk Inventory X is a disk usage utility for Mac OS X 10.3 (and later). It shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called "treemaps". It's free: http://www.derlien.com/ OmniDiskSweeper is a utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks. It can be used in unlicensed mode to search for big files on your disks, but if you pay the $15 license fee you'll have access to a handy button that also lets you delete those files: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/