I noticed I was a little low on hard drive space on my mini, and found my "User's" folder is almost 30 GB's in size. Is this normal? Everyone else I talk to has a User's folder <10 GB.
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"Users" 28 GB?!?
- Thread starter SkyBell
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Depends on how much stuff people have got in their accounts... my user's folder at work, the one that gets backed up every night, has about 60gb in it, the one here at home has 87gb.
The Users folder contains each users home folder which contains all of the files that should be unique to each individual user of the machine. it holds your documents, music library, videos, everything on your desktop, application preference files, internet plug-ins, browser cache and cookies, etc. Most save dialog boxes default either directly to your home folder or a folder within your home folder. Some applications will even save files to the home folder without asking you. Basically, if you threw away your home folder (which I would highly recommend not doing) you would be throwing away the majority of what makes it your computer as opposed to someone else's (except for the applications you have installed).
that's usually music and video files that will end up taking up that much room without you noticing.
if you think something fishy is going on or you want to know more directly what's happening to your storage space, you could use a technique I use every once in while.
open your home folder. switch to list view (apple-2). then select the "Show View Options" menu item in the "View" menu. select "Calculate All Sizes" and click on the "Size" column header in the window to organize the list by size. with this setup, you can see exactly how much is in each folder. by using the little folder arrows beside the folders (instead of double clicking the folders), you can delve down deeper into the bigger folders or the folders that are suspiciously large. This is an effective and fairly quick way to get a good bearing on how your hard drive is being used.
Note: You will need to be patient for the folder sizes to load. this can take a while depending on the size and quantity of files in the folder you are examining. Also, you will probably want to switch the "Calculate All Sizes" setting back off as leaving this setting on can have a dramatic effect on your hard drive's responsiveness.
that's usually music and video files that will end up taking up that much room without you noticing.
if you think something fishy is going on or you want to know more directly what's happening to your storage space, you could use a technique I use every once in while.
open your home folder. switch to list view (apple-2). then select the "Show View Options" menu item in the "View" menu. select "Calculate All Sizes" and click on the "Size" column header in the window to organize the list by size. with this setup, you can see exactly how much is in each folder. by using the little folder arrows beside the folders (instead of double clicking the folders), you can delve down deeper into the bigger folders or the folders that are suspiciously large. This is an effective and fairly quick way to get a good bearing on how your hard drive is being used.
Note: You will need to be patient for the folder sizes to load. this can take a while depending on the size and quantity of files in the folder you are examining. Also, you will probably want to switch the "Calculate All Sizes" setting back off as leaving this setting on can have a dramatic effect on your hard drive's responsiveness.
That's where the user's accounts are. Everybody's 'home' folder, including yours.
What I mean by stuff is all my files: music, work, emails, etc.
That's a nice tip macfreek57, thanks.
Do you know what the function of the 'Library' folder is?
Actually a program like http://www.id-design.com/Software/WhatSize/ might be better if you know what to delete and what not to delete (e.g. everything in /var/vm is something YOU DON'T TOUCH)
~/Library is where all your cookies, bookmarks, caches, support files, user fonts, settings, preferences, Safari info, email from Mail.app, user screensavers and alllllll that good stuff goes into. Something you do not want to delete, cause if it's anything in your Users folder that's particularly important, it's Library as it usually has all your settings for everything.
If you want to check what's clogging up so much space on your HD, you might want to check out Grand Perspective. It visually shows you what's taking up space.
Ok, yeah, I have a lot of movies. But I thought movies, music and the like had their own folders, not in the User's folder?
Yeah, those folders are in your account folder which is in the User's folder. Why don't you take a look into it, see how things are arranged... don't delete anything.
Movies, pictures, music all do have their own folder, which is within your Users folder.
Mine is 90Gb, 31Gb of music, 28.5Gb of movies, 15 Gb of pictures and 15Gb of Documents.
Mine is 90Gb, 31Gb of music, 28.5Gb of movies, 15 Gb of pictures and 15Gb of Documents.
File-system hierarchy.
First Level:
/ (root)
Second Level:
/Users
Third Level:
/seancollins (for example)
Fourth Level:
/music (for example)
Full path:
/Users/seancollins/music