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What is filling my HD?

M

mjwman

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 5, 2010
12
0
Hi ,
I am trying to free up some space on my Macbook Pro HD.

Info tells me it has 92.84 gb capacity and I have used 70.97 gb
But I do not know where. Clicking on my files shows not much used at all so what is using it?
I have photos on there 3.18 gb
music 9.85gb

And really thats prety much all that I have on it!
I have been through the apps and deleted those I do not use but still it says the HD is about 70% full.

Am I missing something?
Can I search something that will show mw a breakdown?

Any advice welcome please..
 
Have you tired installing windows via bootcamp recently? I had an unsuccessful installation and lost more than half my hard drive space, a permissions fix sorted out the problem.
 
Thanks

Thanks for those links.
Now I see where all the memory has gone!
Unfortunately, I do not know what is safe to remove!
 
Hopefully a screen shot is attached somehow....
 

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It is. :)

You have quite a few things in your root directory. There are always a bunch of hidden files and folders which you see in Disk Inventory X, but normally the only ones that would show up in Finder are /Applications, /Library, /System, /Users, and sometimes /Developer. You might want to have a poke through the others and see if they can be deleted or moved somewhere a bit more logical, like your home folder.

Beyond that, it looks like you have 30 GB unaccounted for in your Users folder, so I'd focus there. There's nothing in Users that can't be deleted if you don't need it, aside from the contents of each user's respective ~/Library folder.
 
mjwman said:
Hi ,
I am trying to free up some space on my Macbook Pro HD.

Info tells me it has 92.84 gb capacity and I have used 70.97 gb
But I do not know where. Clicking on my files shows not much used at all so what is using it?
I have photos on there 3.18 gb
music 9.85gb

And really thats prety much all that I have on it!
I have been through the apps and deleted those I do not use but still it says the HD is about 70% full.

Am I missing something?
Can I search something that will show mw a breakdown?

Any advice welcome please..
Click to expand...

The operating system take up a lot of space, about 10-20 GB. That might explain a bit of it.
 
Thanks all for you appreciated and continuing help. Here are the screenshots requested showing Users.
 

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It looks to me like you misplaced a decimal point when talking about your photo library...

I'm sure you're as capable as we are of reading the numbers and figuring out what big stuff you can do without. You might also want to move the 2.7 GB of stuff off your desktop into a folder somewhere.
 
mjwman said:
Thanks all for you appreciated and continuing help. Here are the screenshots requested showing Users.

BlueRevolution said:
It looks to me like you misplaced a decimal point when talking about your photo library...

I'm sure you're as capable as we are of reading the numbers and figuring out what big stuff you can do without. You might also want to move the 2.7 GB of stuff off your desktop into a folder somewhere.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

yea wow. 15.8GB of pictures! (or 15.8GB of data in the pictures folder). have a sort through there and see what you dont need!

else, upgrade HDD! (its easy)
 
Preview Document

I have run Disc Inventory X, and have seen that I have 14.4GB of Preview Document. Are those files necessary or are they essentially a cache. Should I keep them or get rid of them? That's a lot of space as I only have 10GB left on my 500 GB drive in my MacBook Pro.

Thanks in advance.
 
brians said:
I have run Disc Inventory X, and have seen that I have 14.4GB of Preview Document. Are those files necessary or are they essentially a cache. Should I keep them or get rid of them? That's a lot of space as I only have 10GB left on my 500 GB drive in my MacBook Pro.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Preview Document? as in .pdf files? thats a lot of those types of images. would you mind posting pictures?

it is recommended to have >20GB free on your HDD for best performance.

mjwman said:
Thanks again guys I will have look at what you say.
Click to expand...
awsome let us know how it goes :D
 
Figured it out. Turns out it is my jpeg files. Weird name for them. I basically searched through all of the files corresponding to the color and realized what they were. I had assumed the jpegs would be called pictures or something. Thanks.
 
Just to follow up on whats been happening.
Again thanks for all help it really was useful.
Disc inventory X is also great.
I cleaned a lot of my photos out of Kodak EasyShare and found a bit of space.
I ended up with 20.37gb and had 72.47 used. Still a lot I felt.
Then I discovered iPhoto that I do not use but did invesyigate a couple of times and that had loads of photos in it. Most duplicated and many erased from easyShare. I thought that photos were only in one location and that sorting progs just found them, but it appears that iPhoto duplicated the files.

I now have 33.23gb free space. 59.61 is used. Is that reasonable or still a bit high? Should I look anywhere else for unused files?
 

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Well, it still looks like you have a lot more photos on your computer than you seem to think, but there's no real benefit to deleting any more stuff. If you want to get rid of it, that's up to you, but unless you have a pressing need to free up the space for something else, I wouldn't bother to investigate any further. There's no performance improvement to having 43 GB of free space vs. 33 GB.
 
mjwman said:
I now have 33.23gb free space. 59.61 is used. Is that reasonable or still a bit high? Should I look anywhere else for unused files?
Click to expand...

thats a great amount of free space. i normally recommend to keep it above 15GB free space (for virtual memory). OSX seems to love more then that :D
 
Thanks again guys that is great.
I just don't like the idea of files on the hard drive that are not needed. Especially photos I dont know about or cant see!
 
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