My MBP has an 80 gig internal hard drive that has approx. 1 gb free. The only media I have on the computer is approx. 40 gigs of music, all of my photos are on an external drive. How can I free up space without moving my music to an exernal drive? Thanks!
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Help, my hard drive is full!
- Thread starter tvham
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I'm assuming you are using iTunes so first you should check to see if iTunes made copies of your music files. You can do a search in Finder and see if there are duplicate copies of your music. If there are then read below.
In iTunes' preference menu go to Advance and see if "copy files to iTunes Media folder" is checked. If it is then uncheck it and look at the location of the Media folder so that you can find it. You can also use Finder to find the location of your music files. Keep your music in the folder you prefer and delete the other music files.
If you don't have duplicate music files then something else is taking up all your hard drive space. You can install an application like OmiDiskSweeper and it will tell you all your files sizes and their locations so you can manually delete the ones you know you don't want. After that the only other option is to upgrade your hard drive. 80 gigs is pretty small nowadays so you might want to plan on doing that eventually if not now.
In iTunes' preference menu go to Advance and see if "copy files to iTunes Media folder" is checked. If it is then uncheck it and look at the location of the Media folder so that you can find it. You can also use Finder to find the location of your music files. Keep your music in the folder you prefer and delete the other music files.
If you don't have duplicate music files then something else is taking up all your hard drive space. You can install an application like OmiDiskSweeper and it will tell you all your files sizes and their locations so you can manually delete the ones you know you don't want. After that the only other option is to upgrade your hard drive. 80 gigs is pretty small nowadays so you might want to plan on doing that eventually if not now.
I just put a 500 gig replacement in my macbook. It cost about $79 and took about 30 minutes. I loaded a recent backup from time machine and everything was exactly as I had left it. Except for the extra 420 gb of free space.It really does make a huge difference having some extra room.
Do a search in Finder as I said above (The type in area in the top right corner of Finder). Do a search for a song you have and look at the two folders they are in. If you have duplicates there should be one in each folder. Unless you have your songs scattered everywhere they should only be in two folders. Delete all the songs in one of the folders.
If you don't have duplicates then you should download and use OmiDiskSweeper like I said above. It's a good application to have anyways because you can quickly see what is taking up all of your hard drive.
Dont do this, this will erase your whole itunes library.
Give monlingual a try, IIRC you can free up about 2gb but removing all the languages you dont need. Also as someone mentioned, you might just want to upgrade the HDD capacity. it's not like you filled up a 500gb and need more space. Save up $80 and buy a 500gb, then you wont need to worry about this again for a while.
Huh? The OP says that their Photos are on an external, NOT his music. Doing this would wipe out the only copy of his/her music.
To the OP:
If you only have 40GB of music, consider moving that to an external (at least temporarily) and consider, as others have suggested, upgrading the internal HD. SATA 2.5" drives are dirt cheap (compared to older PATA 2.5" drives).
If you have a current backup, consider checking the directory structure using Disk Utility. I've seen circumstances where directory corruption suddenly allows a small file to think it's consuming several GigaBytes of space. You can do a "Verify" without booting from your original install Disc.
Other things might be overgrown log files due to errors being logged frequently (or TOO frequently).
Until you free up some space, be very careful how many Apps you run. Reboot and check the free space. If you find you have a lot more, this is the Virtual Memory swap files. They will grow in size the more programs you run simultaneously as you run out of "real" RAM.
Too long a post, sorry 'bout that.
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No reason to be running an 80GB HDD unless of course it is SSD. Hard drives are cheap, plus a 500GB will make your computer way faster because of the extra free space and the higher platter density.
Try using this program: http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/
It erases all the languages you don't use off your hard drive and can free up almost a Gig of space...
It erases all the languages you don't use off your hard drive and can free up almost a Gig of space...