Newbie with a start disc issue!

[DohaDi]

Hi all. My 1 yr old MacBook Pro keeps telling me that there is no space on the start up disc, so it can't do anything. So I went and bought the Time Machine, thinking that I could back everything up, then delete the couple of thousand photos I have from the internal Mac HD ... Well, 2 days ago the back up started, and so far only 2.59 GB has been done out of 282 GB. I hardly save anything on my Mac doc-wise, just photos ... but I just cannot see how I have 282 GB of stuff on it!

Any hints, anyone, for speeding up this initial back up? Or temporarily creating more space on the start up disc so I can do things like scanning??

Help please! I am not a young clever IT lad: I am a struggling 60+ lady pensioner!

 

[Matthew Yohe]

Hi all. My 1 yr old MacBook Pro keeps telling me that there is no space on the start up disc, so it can't do anything. So I went and bought the Time Machine, thinking that I could back everything up, then delete the couple of thousand photos I have from the internal Mac HD ... Well, 2 days ago the back up started, and so far only 2.59 GB has been done out of 282 GB. I hardly save anything on my Mac doc-wise, just photos ... but I just cannot see how I have 282 GB of stuff on it!

Any hints, anyone, for speeding up this initial back up? Or temporarily creating more space on the start up disc so I can do things like scanning??

Help please! I am not a young clever IT lad: I am a struggling 60+ lady pensioner!

Well, you likely don't want to just run Time Machine and then delete your photos. Time Machine isn't really meant to be operated like that. It's just meant as an ongoing backup and if you lose something you can easily recover it and bring it back to your MacBook's hard drive.

Now, on to what could be filling up your drive. I would recommend running something like GrandPerspective. It's a free application that can show you a visual view of your hard drive, showing you what is taking up so much space so that you can decide what you need to delete. It does seem odd that there's 282GB worth of stuff being taken up on your computer already, but anyway, this app can help you see what's going on: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

 

[Matthew Yohe]

Also the Time Machine backup will likely take awhile too, so you can probably just stop that right now, since you can do it later when you aren't trying to use your computer, and then run this application I'm telling you about. This Grandperspective application will also likely take awhile (but not as long as Time Machine). You will likely want to run Time Machine overnight.