Yikes...maximizing storage on the 128GB rMBP is harder than I thought!

[thefrenches]

I received my rMBP yesterday, taking advantage of (apparently) the last day of the Best Buy sale (and the moving sale, as my business IS moving, so I had a legit reason to use it ) and my mid-2009 MBP was a 250GB drive, thus I'm having a really difficult time moving to this 128GB device. I used Migration Assistant to help with all the bits of data to make it easier to use (saved tabs, passwords, data, etc) and used Selective Sync for Dropbox, as well as not copying ANY of my video files, and keeping all my documents on the synced Dropbox folders...yet still I have only 28GB left!!! I've been eliminating programs (those copied from Migration Assistant as well, of course) and emptying trash every step of the way.

Seems silly to me that Dropbox needs to sync the folders at ALL on the computer, really, as it's supposed to be 'cloud' storage, so perhaps if I get close to maxing out, I'll not sync anything and use only what file is needed, when I need it, by downloading each as-is.

 

[nws0291]

There really is not much space on that 128. You might benefit from a JetDrive Lite that you can use as a temp folder for file sync between the cloud and local disk.

 

[Weaselboy]

You can go to DropBox prefs and click selective sync here and uncheck folders you don't want synced to the MacBook to save some space.

 

[thefrenches]

You can go to DropBox prefs and click selective sync here and uncheck folders you don't want synced to the MacBook to save some space.

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Right, as I said above, I used Selective Sync - I still am not quite sure if I need those folders synced on this laptop or not, but will try the 'essential' ones for as long as possible. If I could break down the folders even FURTHER, that would be nice, but in the end I might have to separate the folders within the 'master' folders that I'm syncing, putting them in separate ones, which probably makes more sense anyway

 

[Weaselboy]

Right, as I said above, I used Selective Sync - I still am not quite sure if I need those folders synced on this laptop or not, but will try the 'essential' ones for as long as possible. If I could break down the folders even FURTHER, that would be nice, but in the end I might have to separate the folders within the 'master' folders that I'm syncing, putting them in separate ones, which probably makes more sense anyway

Ackk... I apologize. I completely missed that you mentioned that.

 

[yjchua95]

Right, as I said above, I used Selective Sync - I still am not quite sure if I need those folders synced on this laptop or not, but will try the 'essential' ones for as long as possible. If I could break down the folders even FURTHER, that would be nice, but in the end I might have to separate the folders within the 'master' folders that I'm syncing, putting them in separate ones, which probably makes more sense anyway

If you can, uninstall the built-in iLife apps (iMovie, iPhoto and GarageBand) if you don't use them that much.

 

[swordfish5736]

Do you have an iPhone and/or iPad? If so did you sync apps, and backup to your old MacBook Pro?



Check out an app like disk inventory X or omnidisksweeper to help see what exactly is taking up space. Just be careful if you venture into system files.

 

[sundog925]

SDXC for extra removable storage?

 

[netsped]

I've been living with 128GB of storage since 2012 and it's been great. My files have never been more organized and through the years I've uploaded most of my photo library to Flickr and my documents and other files to Dropbox and Google Drive (the most important ones go to Dropbox).

Is hard at the beginning, but once you get used to it is amazing.

I've never been under 85GB of free space and I have every app I need (Photoshop, Sketch, Espresso, etc). I only keep active client projects locally and once finished they go to the cloud and to an external hard drive. I've never keep that many personal files, but most are on Dropbox. Which makes them easy to access on all my devices.

I also bought a 32GB SD card (which I'm looking to replace with a 64GB Nifty Drive or similar) to keep my iTunes library at (which I also cleaned, freeing quite a few gigs).

If you have the will to clean and organize your files, it's not hard at.

EDIT.

Oh, I forgot. The first thing I do when I get a Mac or make a clean install is to erase fonts I don't need, extra voices, backgrounds, screen savers, dictionaries, etc. I use an app called Whatsize to determine what is taking the space and to decide if I need it or not.

 

[JTToft]

An option is to change your hibernate mode, so that it doesn't write the RAM contents to disk when it goes into standby.
Changing that and removing the sleep image will save you an amount of space equal to your RAM size.

The downside is that you'll lose your standby state if your battery runs out.