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I am cleaning up a really old mac to bring it back to use. It has an 80 gig hard drive and after wiping out downloads, documents, pictures, music, videos and unneccesary applications I am now stranded at about 48 gigs. I read that Leopard needs about 9 gigs, how do I get rid of the remaining 20 gb without reinstalling. Its been three and half years since I bought it and I could only find Part 2 of the recovery disk. (I have already gotten rid of iLife, iTunes, iWorks, Web Browsers, Printer Drivers etc as I need only terminal based facilities such as lynx and vi.) If anyone could point me to solutions for freeing up as much space as I can it'd be very helpful.

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You can use Monolingual to trim the locales you don't require. This should trim at least a couple of GB.

The printer drivers are located in /Library/Printers. You can delete everything within the Printers directory (note, do not touch the /System/Library/Printers/ directory).

Additionally, if it's a default install, it may have come with iLife. GarageBand loops also take up a few GB and are located in /Library/Application Support/Garageband/Apple Loops/.

There are other areas you can trim space, but those will net the biggest gains. You can also give programs like DaisyDisk a shot (or free equivalent). They'll show you how data is distributed on your hard drive, and allow you to further pinpoint cruft that can be removed.

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thanks.. I got rid of the printer drivers.. I will try monolingual now. – yayu Nov 23 '11 at 8:10
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@yayu No problem. I've edited my answer to include GarageBand loops, which take up a massive amount of space if you have iLife installed. – cksum Nov 23 '11 at 8:56
Thanks for the pointers .. I have freed up about 10 gb more. There's still some 10 gb lying somewhere... would trying to find it among the system files be worth the risk? – yayu Nov 23 '11 at 9:08
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@yayu Give DaisyDisk (or equivalent) a try. Anything under /System is required. You can remove some things, but typically it won't affect hard disk space that dramatically. Most of the big ticket items are under /Library or your user (or /Applications). – cksum Nov 23 '11 at 9:13
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@yayu also check out how to remove built-in speech synthesis voices! – MattiSG Nov 23 '11 at 21:08

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