Find Size of a Home Directory

[JordanJ]

Hi All!

A bit of backstory: I currently use a shared iMac at home. There are 4 user accounts for each member of my family. As I progress further up the education ladder into Yr 12 and Uni (College), both me and my parents think that it would be more beneficial for me to get a MacBook, most likely the 15" Retina MBP. (I like a bit of screen real estate and grunt)

My problem is, I'm not sure what storage size to get, so I thought a good indicator would be to check the size of the home user folder, as this would contain all my music, videos, documents etc... from the past 4-5 years. I don't want to fork out and get a 768 GB SSD If I only have 70GB of stuff already. I assumed this would be as easy as "Getting Info" on the Users/username folder, however this just returns "--" under size.

My account is managed, (so I'm not an Admin...) but I can obtain admin access if required. I am currently running 10.7.4 (latest build of Lion).

Any help would be greatly appreciated as my folks would like to know the MBP config in the next week or so.

Thanks!

 

[satcomer]

The cheapest way is moved the User account iTunes files to a good external (using the fastest port on you Mac). I say this because that movies/music are the largest files most typical users have. This should free up a lot of free space on your internal drive. Heck to you alos move you iPhoto Library to an external.

Then consider backing up that new media external to a backup, just incase.

 

[hamzilla]

It should be as easy as using "Get Info" on your home directory. It could respond with "--" if you do not have the appropriate permission to read the directory. So if you were accidentally logged in as another user that would explain it but I'm speculating.

If you are comfortable with the terminal, I would suggest running:

du -sh /Users/<username>

This will tell you the size. If it fails, then have an administrator account log in and run:

sudo du -sh /Users/<username>

Hope this helps.

 

[JordanJ]

It should be as easy as using "Get Info" on your home directory. It could respond with "--" if you do not have the appropriate permission to read the directory. So if you were accidentally logged in as another user that would explain it but I'm speculating.

Still can't "Get Info" the folder. I am logged in as me and I have read+write permission levels set. But...

If you are comfortable with the terminal, I would suggest running:

du -sh /Users/<username>

This will tell you the size.

This worked fine. Looks like I'm gonna need a 512 or 768 GB - just over 260GB on my folder now... Didn't think it would be that much!!

Thanks for all your help!

----------

Can that! I realised what my troubles were.... I wasn't patient!

The "Get Info" will eventually show your Home Dir size, but you have to wait a little bit! Sorry!