Running out of disk space

[Koffie]

Hi,
I have the problem that I am running out of disk space, so I would think I need to move files to an external drive/upgrade drive or whatever.
Point is that I am happy with my 500GB hard drive, and do not wish to upgrade to a slower 1TB drive (I have Momentus XT now)
And moving files to an external drive is an option, but I will clear up only a small amount of space by moving what i don't really need.
When I took a look with Daisydisk, I found that 220GB of my hard drive is used by "Hidden files" this seems excessively large to me.
Daisydisk can not look which files are actually so big, not even when I scan as administrator.
I am running OSX Lion by the way

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Could it be this?
What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating up my space? by theSeb

 

[Koffie]

Thanks!
I plugged in my time machine drive and ran all backups.
I also found out through disk utility that the disk information was wrong, and therefore the free blocks were not right.
After a repair through the recovery partition, only 4GB "hidden" left, and about 200GB of free space again

 

[Cubytus]

This is still enormous. Do you store a large music&video library on the disk?

 

[techguy20]

There are some applications out there that can free 5-10GB by clearing out the other languages that OSX has by default.

Some people suggest against these, and I haven't personally used them, but I figured I'd throw it out there nonetheless.

One such app is CleanMyMac:
http://macpaw.com

There's also a free one called Monolingual
http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Some people suggest against these, and I haven't personally used them, but I figured I'd throw it out there nonetheless.

Why?

One such app is CleanMyMac:
http://macpaw.com

One app that I would not recommend, based on the number of complaints that have been posted in this forum and elsewhere, is CleanMyMac. As an example: CleanMyMac cleaned too much.

There's also a free one called Monolingual
http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

It removes unwanted languages and removes PPC code.

 

[GGJstudios]

One such app is CleanMyMac:

I would not recommend CleanMyMac, based on the number of complaints that have been posted in this forum and elsewhere. As an example: CleanMyMac cleaned too much. While you may not have experienced problems yet, enough people have that it's wise to avoid it, especially since there are free alternatives that have better reputations, such as Onyx.

You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Most only remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.

These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. In fact, deleting some caches can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.

Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.

Five Mac maintenance myths​

Many have successfully used Monolingual to remove unwanted languages and architectures to free up drive space, but even that will not make your Mac run faster.