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External hard drive-what to move...

question fear

question fear

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Apr 10, 2003
2,277
84
The "Garden" state
I just finally got around to purchasing an external hard drive for my macbook. I am down to something ridiculous like 5gb of space.

I am still on Tiger, and won't be upgrading to Leopard for a while (probably this summer) so any suggestions on the best way to back up in the meantime? Any suggestions of software, etc would be appreciated.

Also, besides the obvious (iTunes music, old photos, etc) what else can I move to the hard drive to free up space?
 
I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner as a backup solution. V3.00 is better than ever, works with Leopard (so you'll have no problems when you do upgrade), and is surprisingly simple to use. It does the work for you - you just have to provide the source, destination, and your password.

As for moving stuff around, movies tend to be large, and can safely be moved to an external drive to free up space. Also, if you keep an archive of installers like I do, move that to your external drive. Xcode installers alone take up 900 MB to 1.1 GB per installer. :eek:
 
Personally I would keep iTunes music on the local drive for when your without your external. Nothing worse than clicking on a song on your library and getting that little exclamation mark... GRR!

Do you have any large video files? They can probably go on the external.

I'm not sure about Tiger backups. I was one of those bad people that didn't back up religiously before Time Machine
 
If you never did a clean install of Tiger, remove any unused printer drivers and fonts. If you don't use GarageBand remove that along with all of its sample files. I don't have clear instructions to provide, but a Google search should provide many results with instructions for clearing those out.

Also, Mac's tend to have some trialware on them. Check the applications folder for things like Quicken and Microsoft Office. There may also be some games or other junk in there that you're not aware of if you didn't do a clean install.
 
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