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Exploring the HD

Avatar Graham Caves
Morning folks,

Does anyone know of any good applications which would help me find out what is on my Mac HD please.

The capacity is 320GB of which 265GB has been used!

Just want to go through it and see what I can remove or delete!

Many Thanks

Graham

Re: Exploring the HD

Avatar Mick Burrell
The decision of what to remove must be yours and not made by software so my advice would be to just use the Finder. Good starting points would be to remove old photos, videos and music as these files tend to be larger than most others. These can be moved to say an external drive but do make sure you still have more than one copy before you delete from your internal hard disc.

As an alternative, could you swap your internal drive for a larger one?

Re: Exploring the HD

Avatar Lionel Ogden
If you have an older Macbook the process of HD replacement is easy, as it is also for MacPros. Replacing the Hard drive on an earlier iMac is doable with care, but replacing Hard drives on later iMacs and Macbook pros is only for an authorised Apple service agent. For a local source, Solutions in Bournemouth now have a service and repair department. Members may know of other local service agents.

Re: Exploring the HD

Avatar Eleanor Spenceley
Lionel,

I believe MacBook Pros still have their Hard Drives as 'user installable' parts. (Providing you don't wreck your Mac in the process of upgrading!)

Apple states:
Apple recommends that you have an Apple-certified technician install replacement drives and memory. Consult the service and support information that came with your computer for information about how to contact Apple for service.<br />
If you attempt to install a replacement drive or memory and damage your equipment, such damage is not covered by the limited warranty on your computer.

Then in the user manual, tells how to replace your HD.

Re: Exploring the HD

Avatar Tony Sullivan
One thing you may want to try if you want to free up some space is to use Spotlight to search for large files. Set up a filter to look for, say, files over 1GB - you may be surprised! I found old movies that I'd forgotten about, for instance. You can set up other filters to look for different types of file - e.g. I found I had collected 100's of pdfs over the years that i didnt want/were out of date. Spotlight will find them for you, any you can delete to your hearts content.

Other things you can do is use something like Onyx or CleanMyMac to clear out some of the junk - temp files, caches, logs etc... These can build up over time and become very large files. Clean my mac also gets rid of language files. I don't know about you, but I only ever use English. So far it has reclaimed about 45GB of space for me. It can also do a good job of completely removing unwanted apps - not just the app itself, but also all the other files that go with it. Onyx is free, CleanMyMac costs but is cheap.

Finally, you may want to move something like a large iTunes library, or photo library, to an external hard disk, just remember to point iTunes/iPhoto/Aperture at the new location. The Apple support pages (or, indeed, this site) will be able to tell you how to move things without the parent app 'losing' them.

And have a good back up. Or 6!

Hope this helps...

Re: Exploring the HD

Avatar Tony Sullivan
This may help point you in the right direction... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3234171?start=0&tstart=0

Re: Exploring the HD

Avatar Graham Caves
Hello Chaps,

Many thanks for all your replies - I have learnt a lot doing this and more importantly I have regained about 60GBs of space so far!

Just simple things like moving iTunes films to external HDs gained a lot of space.

I am going to try some of Tonys ideas over the weekend so the hunt to regain space continues!!

I had also copied my pictures from HD into iPhoto so those were duplicated so one copy has been moved to the external HD.

I will let you know how I get on with this project and how much space I can get back.
 
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