My iMac's hard-disk is almost full

[Caezar]

My iMac's hard-disk is almost full and I am contemplating buying a larger one. If I do so, what will be the best way to transfer all my files, applications, OS settings to the new drive?

Or alternatively, would I be better off to keep my existing hard-disk and store my media files (iTunes, iPhoto, movies) to an external drive?

Caezar

(iMac Core Duo 20', 250GB, running on Tiger)

 

[vicious7]

The latter makes more sense.

 

[Genghis Khan]

Yeah...buy an external hard drive...i'm fast approaching your same predicament and have decided that's the direction i'm going.

 

[Royale w/cheese]

If you do go the external route, get a Firewire & USB combo external. FW is definitely better in the long run in my opinion. What I would do is get a NewerTech Ministack empty enclosure and then buy the drive separately. That way it would always be very easy to upgrade or replace the drive and other components. Plus it looks beautiful with the last gen iMac and Mac Mini.

 

[jczubach]

edit your porn!

 

[CaveMac]

are you sure hour HD is really full?

Before you rush off to buy a new hard drive--make sure that your old one is actually using all of its capacity. I just discovered that there was a lot of "lost" hard disk capacity on my hard drive due to a faulty volume structure. I was noticing in recent weeks that my hard disk capacity was shrinking on an hourly basis, even without downloading or saving any new files. In my case, I was running an old G3 PowerBook under OS 10.3.9, with 5.6 GB hard drive. Checking the capacity used (using WhatSize), I discovered that only 3.3 GB were actually allocated to files and 2.3 GB were simply missing? At first I suspected some kind of virus hogging the disk space, but it turned out that it was a faulty volume structure that lead to the space being lost from the catalog file. Running Tech Tool repaired the volume structure without a problem and freed up 2.3 GB of hard disk capacity! For my old G3, this corresponded to a whopping 40% more capacity! Give it a try!

 

[A Pittarelli]

buy and external and just dump the extra stuff on there

 

[Caezar]

Thanks for your replies. I did a scan with Disk Inventory X and realized that it is the iMovies projects that are killing me.

I might keep the original footage (in mp4 format) and delete the iMovie projects after I have exported them to a Quicktime movie format. This way, I will hopefully save some space.

Also, I realized GarageBand (which I never use) is taking some valuable space. If I drag the Application to the Trash, will the tracks follow as well?

 

[sparkyms]

You'll probably need to delete GarageBands library files for it to do that. I'm not entirely sure tho...