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SuperFreak

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 16, 2012
36
0
Hey

I'm in need of making more space on my Macbook Pro, and i cant help but think that there is a ton of stuff on it that i dont even need and is taking up lots of room, ive deleted some music and moved to an external HD, which made me about 4/5GB space.

Now, when i right-click my Macintosh HD disk on my desktop, it shows i have 49.26GB available however, when i click 'about this mac' it shows a little chart of what stuff is taking up room, audio, images etc, but says that i only have 36.35GB free...

So which one is correct, how much space do i actually have free?

Q2:

on the 'about this mac', it says 'Other' 45.67GB, what on earth is that? I have 45gb+ of random 'other' stuff on my mbp taking up that much room?

It also says 'moveis 874.5GB' and 'photos 1.91gb' .. i havent got any movies or photos on my macbook, that i know of.. how can i find this and delete/move to ex drive?

I have no idea how i have 21.9GB worth of Apps on my MBP... Is this just general applications? Because when i right hand click my applications folder, it shows only 15.72GB.. Same for backups, where are the 12.94GB of backups saved!?

My audio programme(logic) is starting to run slow, as well as my MBP in general, only after upgrading to Mavericks may i add. It takes REALLY long to shut down and start up now since upgrading.

So i would like help on finding this stuff as well as tips on how to just clear up space.

thank you.

I have a MacBook Pro 15-inch late 2008
Processor 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP51.007E.B06
SMC Version (system): 1.41f2
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled
 

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Last edited:

stevemiller

macrumors 68000
Oct 27, 2008
1,979
1,476
here are some general notes:

-the movies is ~800mb, not 800gb, so its likely a single movie/show that maybe was placed in an unusual spot. you can do a spotlight search with the filter "kind is movie" to track it down

-with photos, i know software like iPhoto likes to hide pictures from the finder inside its own library file. haven't used it much so i can't really advise on the best practice for exporting to an external, but that is at least where i'd start looking.

-the difference in free space between finder and "about this mac" is apparently that about this mac counts your local backups as taking from available space, whereas finder does not. local backups are an "as space permits" kinda thing, so in theory if you needed the space, these backups would automatically condense or delete themselves.

-"other," which seems to be the main culprit, is kind of a catch-all for everything else. if you are a logic user, this would probably encompass all your project files, as well as any caches generated while you were working. i use adobe after effects, and i have on occasion discovered that it alone has created over 50gb worth of cache files in my library folder. in finder, go to your ~/Library folder, and sort by size to see if you've got anything huge (mine will immediately pop the caches folder to the top of the list under the category "10gb - 1tb"). if you do, i'd research on google for the appropriate way to clear out the cache for whatever application is causing trouble.

good luck!
 
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