I'm having space problems on my internal HD. I have OSX v10.39 on it and I'm wondering how much space this OS uses. I'm also wondering what can I transfer to the external HD. Is it possible to transfer applications or programs that are bundled with the OS to the external HD? There is probably a lot of stuff I don't need or use but may want to keep on hand for later.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
making space
- Thread starter CommonMan
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
There are a number of things that you can do to conserve or reclaim space.
One thing is that the OS install may have included a number of non-American English localization files that you will never need. There is a shareware utility, DeLocalize, that will remove those. Quite nice.
Also, you can indeed move applications bundled with the system to an external hard drive with no problem. In fact, you can re-home your entire User Home directory so that it resides on the external drive if so desired.
You may also want to do a search for files larger than a certain limit, say 10 MB or something, and see if you have some big files sitting around that you don't need - perhaps temp files gone bad or something. Occasionally this will happen and you'll lose a boatload of space quickly.
I'll white out the obligatory "delete your pr0n" comment.
One thing is that the OS install may have included a number of non-American English localization files that you will never need. There is a shareware utility, DeLocalize, that will remove those. Quite nice.
Also, you can indeed move applications bundled with the system to an external hard drive with no problem. In fact, you can re-home your entire User Home directory so that it resides on the external drive if so desired.
You may also want to do a search for files larger than a certain limit, say 10 MB or something, and see if you have some big files sitting around that you don't need - perhaps temp files gone bad or something. Occasionally this will happen and you'll lose a boatload of space quickly.
I'll white out the obligatory "delete your pr0n" comment.
If you have Garageband installed and don't use it, delete out the sample loops etc from (i think) /Library/Application Support/Apple/Garageband - they take up a couple of Gigs from memory
Depends on what kind of install you do.
I did a stripped down one that took about 1.2GB.
The problem is there isn't just one folder for the system.
You have System and Library.
Plus the User folders and the Applications ones too.
Another good space saver is to delete any printer drivers that were installed with the Mac that you'll never use. You can find these drivers in the /Library/Printers folder where each family has its own folder - trash the families that you don't use the printers of.
Finally, if you want to find out where all your disk space has gone I can recommend downloading a copy of the free utility OmniDiskSweeper. This application will scan a disk of your choice to show you, in ascending order, the biggest directories on your disk, including their sub-folders. Using the interface you can drill-down into your disk structure to find out where the biggest files/folders are.
Finally, if you want to find out where all your disk space has gone I can recommend downloading a copy of the free utility OmniDiskSweeper. This application will scan a disk of your choice to show you, in ascending order, the biggest directories on your disk, including their sub-folders. Using the interface you can drill-down into your disk structure to find out where the biggest files/folders are.
I managed to recover 20GB or so by deleting an old user account. Not sure exactly what was in it, but it was definitely no longer needed, and getting rid of it it sure freed up a lot of space! 