When I got this Mac it had about 15GB of free hard disk space of it’s initial 37.26GB. I trawled the folders and deleted a few gig of crap I really didn’t need. Then I ripped 4GB of music to iTunes, copied a DVD or two of RAW photographs, and downloaded a few episodes of Diggnation.
Before I knew it I was teetering around the magic 5GB mark. For reasons I might explain one day, I had to convert a set of Nikon .nef (their proprietary RAW format) files to Adobe .dng (Digital Negative) and I was down to about 286MB.
So, this is what I did.
Firstly I downloaded Monolingual - a free application that safely removes all the languages you don’t use from OSX, and also all the architectures from each application your own processor wont use: I deleted everything from G5 to Intel. This saved me a couple of gigabytes.
Please be warned, however, Monolingual removes items you cannot replace without a full re-install of OSX, and it may have undesired effects on your system. I’m running a G4 MacMini and 10.4.8, and it’s not caused me any troubles.
Then I remembered an application I had seen mentioned on Digg.com a while ago: Disk Inventory X. It gives you a graphical representation of whats taking up valuable storage space, and it’s free. And it beats the old windows search trick of “Search + *.* + Arrange by size”.
I found that a huge portion of my disk space was being taken up by things in the iLife library: iDVD themes, Garageband samples, loops, etc, even though I had removed the majority of iLife, besides iPhoto. Disk Inventory X gives you the path to the offending files, and it’s a simple case of dragging them into the trash.
I’m currently the proud owner of 9.88GB of free hard disk space, which isn’t bad for an hours work.
