Hot answers tagged disk-space
29
I've had a very similar issue, and so I decided to compile several methods for solving it. So, following, there are those options and some of them I got from the answers already provided here. I understand this is a little bit offtopic from the question, but it's in tune with the answers. This has many parts and those are all softwares I could try myself ...
22
You can try :
Disk Inventory X (free one)
DaisyDisk (paid one)
16
Disk Inventory X is another excellent disk space visualizer.
FileVault or any other third party software is not necessary at fault here.
Mac OS X is simply a complex and modern operating system that uses disk space is dynamic and often unpredictable ways. Not only does the swapfile grows and shrinks but OS X also has a sub system that creates a Dynamic ...
15
Download and run GrandPerspective for a nice graphical view of what's occupying disk space -- something like this:
Run this before and after the reboot and you should be able to see what the big differences are.
12
Since you must boot Windows 7 from the internal SSD, and since you also want to run Mac OS X from the same volume, I recommend that you concentrate on cleaning out your existing Mac OS X system and freeing up as much disk space as possible.
You should research on how to make the smallest Windows installation possible, so you can create the smallest BootCamp ...
11
Quit App Store app.
Delete ~/Library/Application Support/AppStore folder.
To avoid App Store still display you have downloaded x bytes of y bytes, four solutions :
Disregards.
Kill storeagent process (type killall storeagent into Terminal).
Logout / login.
Reboot.
With Lion it's shadowed under random folder /private/var/folders/<three level ...
11
This is a feature of the default set up of Mail.app on OS X. It is storing all your messages for "offline viewing" you can turn this off.
Go to Mail > Preferences click on Accounts
Click on your Gmail account on the left
Then click on the Advanced tab.
Under "Keep copies of messages for offline viewing" set that drop-down to "Don't keep copies of any ...
10
The minimum install that comes off the DVD is ~6 gigabytes. If you want to make a smaller install, the easiest thing to do is install it on another partition, trim down the installation, then copy it over to the target drive using ditto or Carbon Copy Cloner.
Though I do not recommend doing any of these, there are a couple of thing installed in the default ...
10
Two things...
If you are starting to run out of disk space deleting files isn't going to help much unless you have massive amounts of waste, eg Old systems from doing an archive and install OS update.Start thinking about getting a bigger hard drive or some extra drives.
In terminal type...
du -hs *
This will list each directory with it's size. It will ...
10
Omni Disk Sweeper by Omni Group is good at helping find the mountains of stuff.
I find that apps and the system folders generally don't take up that much space (everything being relative), that the real hogs are in the Documents, Music, and Movies folders of my user folder.
10
I highly recommend GrandPerspective(Free). Just finding the largest files isn't always that useful: 20 gbs of 3mb music files wouldn't show up, for example. GrandPerspective gives you a great visual breakdown of your harddrive contents regardless of whether your wasted files are in one big .dmg or a few hundred small files or whatever. Further, if you ...
9
Boot Camp doesn't require you to reformat your drive. HFS+ partitions can be live-resized by the Boot Camp Assistant or the Disk Utility without going through the trouble of erasing everything. No file on your Mac OS partition will be affected.
There is, however, the case where you've had your computer for long and Mac OS has written files all across your ...
9
We get a lot of questions about this topic here. You can search for earlier similar questions and answers.
Backup first
Make a full backup of everything, a complete disk image, before you go on a spree to delete resources from your Mac.
Deleting More Unused Human Language Resources
Monolingual, which is free, can delete unwanted language support files in ...
9
It's the folder where iTunes saves the backUps of your iDevice. And it takes so much space because each time you sync a device, previous backUps are not deleted.
Deleting the folder will, then, mean losing those backUps. Doing this regularly is advised for saving HD space. Just make sure to make a new backUp afterwards, and that you won't need those ...
8
I had this same exact problem until 2 days ago followed the procedure outlined on this page: http://www.ipodrepublic.com/iphone/fixing-issue-other-files-iphone-memory/2010/03/31/ and it worked well. Re-created below. I haven't seen my Other size grow since.
Step 1: Turn of sync music in iTunes
When you have synced your iPhone and noticed that “other ...
8
/Users/.harith/harith.sparsebundle is the encrypted contents of your home directory. When you are logged in (as user harith), then the unecrypted contents of that same directory are visible under /Users/harith, that is, your home directory.
So what you're seeing is, your hard disk is full. And your home directory is taking up 178 GiB of space.
IT IS NOT ...
7
Specifically in Lion, here's how to do it:
Go to Launchpad, click and hold on the downloading item
All icons will start wiggling
Click the (X) on the download
or
Hold down the Option key from the “Purchases” menu in the Mac App Store, this causes the “Pause” button to turn into “Cancel”. See this article for detail.
It will ask for a confirmation. I ...
7
If you want to find out how much space an Application and it's associated files are taking up (not just the .app bundle), AppCleaner works great for that. As you can see in this screenshot for Chrome, it shows the application itself, as well as preferences, caches, etc. all nicely totaled up.
6
Another way to do this by enabling the AppStore Debug menu.
Sign out of AppStore.
Quit AppStore.
Open a terminal and execute the following command:
defaults write com.apple.appstore ShowDebugMenu -bool true
Open AppStore again and a Debug menu is now present.
Debug Menu -> Reset Application.
This will reset the current state of the AppStore, including ...
6
Daisy Disk
It's a killer app for analyzing disk use on a Mac. It'll scan all your drives and shows you disk use broken down by customizable buckets: file types, programs, tags, etc. It can show you all the disk space used by a program like Skype if you like and more.
Edit: it's also on sale right now for $10.
6
The amount of space the OS needs is neither fixed nor predictable. It depends on a huge number of factors: what programs you run, what you do in them, what background activity they trigger, what background activity happens for other reasons, etc. Hard drive space is used for overflow from RAM, logs, temporary files, etc. If the system reserved a fixed ...
5
It sounds like the space recovered is from your swap (vm) and sleepimage files. Restarting will clear the files in /var/swap/ which can grow considerably if you're running out of RAM or are using a laptop. If you are using a laptop you'll find a file called sleepimage that is the size of the amount of RAM you have installed and it can be safely deleted - ...
5
Yes. You have enabled auditing somewhere along the line, being a wise person, but you have not trimmed the file, being a human, like I. Note the instant edit ;)
man -k audit
if you can get a shell will show you where you need to go
( look at them on the apple dev site )
i think here you want
audit -e
to get rid of your old audit files.
From ...
5
Just move them is probably the best solution. The user caches and preference files stick with the user home folder, so other than convention - most cases it doesn't really matter which volume contains an application. You'll need sudo or file permission tweaking to actually delete some of the apps, but I've found no downsides to moving any apps to an external ...
5
The answer relates to changes to Time Machine backups in Lion.
My understanding is that when a TM back up is attempted when the back up disk is not connected, a back up is made in /Volumes/MobileBackups.
These back ups do not go away the next time TM runs with the back up disk connected. I am not sure if the OS will eventually reclaim this space.
You ...
5
Using the Finder, you can sort the Applications folder (or any other folder) by size, and let it calculate the space inside each folder in addition to sizing the flat files.
The key command Command-Shift-A will open the Applications folder from Finder
The key command Command-J will Show View Options
Then ensure the checkbox to calculate all sizes is ...
5
Grand Perspective is a bit of open source software that visualises the space taken up in a folder. Run it and look for the biggest squares. Hover your mouse over a square and the bottom left of the window shows you the full path to the file you are hovering over.
I prefer it to letting the finder calculate folder sizes, because this is much faster and the ...
4
This space is taken by Application Metadata, and is also taken by Jailbreak applications since iTunes doesn't know that these are regular apps. Doing a full restore of your iPhone through iTunes should clear up this space. There aren't any utilities like DaisyDisk for iOS and the closest thing is iFile on Cydia, an application for managing the files on your ...
4
The hard easiest way would be to wipe your phone, and re-download all the apps again. You won't pay twice: iTunes is clever enough to know what you already downloaded.
But at this stage, I think you'll be better off. It also gives you the confidence that you've done something from scratch. And I think the time it takes will outweigh the time to clear out ...
4
Unfortunately no, the automatic filling takes place during sync, and only gets changed in size if you add/remove things that will also take place during sync.
If you want to limit it while also preserving some of that randomness, try creating a Smart Playlist that will select songs at random, and then tweak the "Limit to" feature until you have enough space ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
