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The Perfect Hard Drive Clean Up - Help!

gusanitoverde

gusanitoverde

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 12, 2003
283
0
Northern California
In a matter of less than a year, I filled my harddrive of almost 100 Gb of stuff. I cleaned up most of the stuff, but freed hard drive space but with very little success. I have summed some of the items I have on my Powerbook, but is still too full. I thought of cleaning up completely my hard drive and start over. The truth is that I have so much stuff, my keychains, configurations to websites, imovie projects, iTunes lib, iPhoto lib (all massive), but still there is about 40 Gb of info I can't seem to find. I know that Apple hides a lot of files from a regular user, but my hard drive space seems not to get any better.
Now, Instead of formatting my drive and migrate my files outside to bring them back in, I tought of transfering my files to a new user account and wipe out the old one, all within the same powerbook.
Keeping in mind that I am looking to Clean "Neat" hard drive and still leave my powerbook's information intact, I have the following questions:

1. Is this procedure going to help me really to recover my lost space?
2. How exactly do I migrate my files from one account to the other?
3. I have an Intel Mac at home. I could use the migration assistant to migrate my powerbook's info to a temporary account in my intel mac and then format my powerbook and then retreive the info back, should I rather do that?

Thanks!!!
My model is: 1.62 G4 Processor 17" Inch screen.
 
Thanks, I'll try it.

But still i don;t think that I will recuperate a very significant amount of space. Any additional ideas? Anyone?

Would a migration of my data between user accounts work?

Thanks Again!
 
If you have a large unused and unidentified chunk of space missing, I'd just run a search for anything over 1GB in size (visible or invisible) or something and see what it turns up. Or run the app referenced above as well.
 
gusanitoverde said:
In a matter of less than a year, I filled my harddrive of almost 100 Gb of stuff. I cleaned up most of the stuff, but freed hard drive space but with very little success. I have summed some of the items I have on my Powerbook, but is still too full. I thought of cleaning up completely my hard drive and start over. The truth is that I have so much stuff, my keychains, configurations to websites, imovie projects, iTunes lib, iPhoto lib (all massive), but still there is about 40 Gb of info I can't seem to find. I know that Apple hides a lot of files from a regular user, but my hard drive space seems not to get any better.
Click to expand...

this might be the most stupid answer you'll get... but this is what happened with me: i haven't cleaned out my thrash bin in a while, and when i did (and silly me kept on wailing my memory is so low!), i got 16GB back. :p
 
WhatSize might help. at least to identify what file is eating your space.

the problem is, without sufficient knowledge, you would not know, if it is system critical or not.

well, that was my problem anyway.

in my case, cache was eating up my space.
 
i found out that ffmpegX can create invisible files, which takes up a lot of space, i found out when i had nothing on my desktop, and i checked it to be taking 4.3 GB. it probably happens when i cancel the ffmpegX conversions. i don't know how to remove it.

another tip: use garageband? i don't, but i still like to show off it's capabilities, so i just deleted it's 2 GB space of garageband loops, and still kept the garageband demos.

games like unreal tournament 2004 has a lot of maps you probably will never use. you can delete it if you don't do that single player championship.

videos eat up a LOT of space. remove ones you probably will never watch again. it's bad to be a video pack rat, especially for an ibook user like me.

idvd's themes use up a lot of space. if you don't create a lot of dvds, then it's ok to delete themes that were there before ilife 04. if possible, remove the whole thing altogether.

your printer drivers take a lot of space. personally, i only installed cannon and epson drivers. (lexmark and brother drivers recommended too)

don't read chinese or japanesse or other languages? then remove them with monolingual.

if you only use the english interface in Mac OSX, and you don't need to see the menus bar in another language, then you can remove them too.

universal binaries do consume some space. use a program that can remove intel binaries if you don't have an intel mac.

burn some files, like a television series, or some movies. you can also use an external hard drive for files that you want to keep but not needed right now.

pictures, videos and music that are TOO high quality should be resized, or converted.
-for example, those 4000+ resolution hubble telescope pictures will do fine if resized to 1600 by 1200.
-some mp3 is 320 kbps will do fine with 192 kbps or 160 kbps (most people can't hear the difference).
-some HD movies are too big and take a lot of space. convert them to something that your monitor can view fine, (for example, convert a 720 p. video to 1024 by ? if you use a 1024 by 768 monitor.)

remove other programs that you probably won't use, like world book 2005, microsoft office test drive, nanosuar 2, idvd, and garageband.

last option, is to move stuff to another hard drive, then wipe the hard drive. by doing this, you select the objects in a folder, not the folder itself. it lessens the possibility that there's an invisible file that will also be copied there too. here's an example. to back up my desktop folder, i create another folder called "desktop", then select all of my files in desktop, then move them to the folder.
 
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