Hard Drive Full Need To Delete Stuff On Macbook

[kidkapree1616]

I have a macbook unibody running leopard, 150g hd and i only have about 850 mb left on it.. i have a lot of pictures music and hd videos from my iphone and hd flip.. i also had made a bunch of imovies.. i bought a 1tib western digital external hd so i can free up some space on my computer.. i backed everything up on the external.. now my question is if i keep my external drive plugged in cant i just delete all the stuff on the computer such as music,photos and videos to free up the space on my hard drive.. ?? i know you cannot delete programs on the mac and try to run them from my external.. but how can i make my computer access the external hd to get all of the music photos and movies so that all the space on my mac will be free..?? can i even make everything save to my external instead of my mac hd???? and also my computers local disk space is low??? please help...

 

[zachsilvey]

You can whatever you want on the external drive as long as it isn't system files.

Just keep in mind that when you put files on the external drive and delete them off your internal drive you no longer have a backup since those files are now in just one place.

Also it is never a good idea to have less than 10% of your hard drive free because the OS needs that space for temporary cache files and swap. You will suffer major performance loss if you fill your hard drive so full.

What you might consider is swapping in a larger drive. 500gb notebook drives are under $100 and 1tb drives aren't much more expensive.

There are plenty of tutorials and guides on moving your iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto libraries onto external drives.