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VERY little space left on drive

biohazard6969

biohazard6969

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 23, 2005
836
0
toronto canada
WOW i just realized that i only have about 50mb of space left on my powerbook's hard drive, with no backup disk or nething to move file to :eek:
i don't want to delete anythhing...i mean my new imac is coming soon so i'll unload all my stuff on it

just thought i'd share

brings up an interesting question, whats the least amount of main drive space you've had available...actually thats a really awkward and specific question...oh well
 
I've read here that you should have at least 8GB of HD space left for virtual memory. Not sure if that number is true though. If so, your a tad bit under that ;)

How much RAM do you have? How smooth is the computer right now? I would think with only 50MB left it wouldn't run that well. Or did you mean GB?
 
biohazard_6969 said:
i don't want to delete anythhing...i mean my new imac is coming soon so i'll unload all my stuff on it
Click to expand...

I'd still try delete something (surely there's a whole bunch of useless crap on there - there is on mine at least!).

I say this as back on my previous computer (an old revB iMac G3) I remember scraping the disk space limit on a number of occasions, right down to zero a few times. On some of these occasions OS X would take revenge by stuffing up some of my preferences (because there was no space to write them to I guess). Not sure if this happens in Tiger still (I know it now warns you if you are getting a bit low), but best to have a bit of breathing space and some spare swap space too.
 
If you thought you had more space than is showing you may have some bloated log files hanging around in a buried folder:

/Library/Logs/Console/<your user name/

There should be at least one file named "console.log" and possibly several more that have filenames ending with a number.

Check the numbered files and see how large they are. I had one that was almost 400 meg. alone. This was caused by some errant Java applet spewing errors all over the place while I was using it for several hours. Ahhh, I love UNIX!

You can safely trash any files whose name ends with a number.
 
iTunes?

iTunes takes up more than a third of my 60GB drive. So far I haven't needed to free-up any space, but here's what I'd do. I'd make a Smart Playlist with the following criteria:
- Star rating less than three, and
- Play count equals zero
Then, burn that entire playlist onto CD/DVD and then delete it from your HD. You'll probably lost a third to half your songs but you won't miss them. In my case I'd get about 5-Gigs back. Your mileage may vary.

Also -- from the "Been There Done That" file -- remember that OSX doesn't actually free-up any disk space when you move files into the Trash. You have to "Empty Trash" to recover the space.
 
I had the entire Alias series on my old computer, which kind of ate up the hard drive. I had about 30MB left, although this was on a windows machine. Now that I'm just using iTunes sized videos and burning the HD videos to DVD, I have much more space.
 
I got down to 95 MB free the other day (160 GB drive). I "fixed" it by buying a 250 :D

PS. Anyone in NZ want a 160 GB SATA?
 
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