My hard drive space was rapidly depleting on my MacBook Pro, and needed to free up some space quickly. I decided to crowd source the answer, and my #lazyweb tweet resulted in some great pointers from my friends @markjaquith, @80085, and @lesmothian.
Here is how I freed over 16gb of space on my OS X Startup Disc.
- Speak only one language? Me too. But, your computer speaks dozens. Delete the extra language packs with Monolingual. This was about a 3.2gb score. I was surprised that it even got the language packs for 3rd party programs too.
- Personally I’ve never hooked up to any other brand of printer besides HP, Brother and Lexmark. Go into /Library/Printers and delete the printer drivers for any printer you don’t currently have a profile for or have never heard of. This will win you another ~2gb or so.
- After that, you need to go on a killing spree. My weapon of choice is App Zapper, a $12.95 shareware app that is billed as the “uninstaller that Apple forgot”. Go into your ~/Applications folder and start hunting for programs to Zap. Good candidates are trial apps you never registered, stolen software you never use (you dirty pirate), free ware apps you’re keeping “just in case”, and those lame iLife apps you don’t need (I’m looking at you iWeb and Garage Band). Zap to your heart’s content, and then empty your Trash.
- Finally, use a program like JDiskReport or GrandPerspective to find out which folders are eating up your hard drive. Usually you can find a few caches of files that can either be backed up to some other media or just deleted entirely. When trying to figure out what to keep, my criteria is simple: Do I love it? Do I need it? Does it make me money? If I can’t get at least one yes, then I get it out of my life and send it to that dark place that bits go when they are reset to zer0.
Rinse and Repeat every 3 months. Enjoy!
I had no idea all that space was being taken up on my Mac!
In September, you can also upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard and free up another 6GB. Check it (midway down the page): http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/
I did the language thing and also remove the basic arch and I am unable to run the keyboard on my mac. what can I do?
Jeff
Not really sure what you can do here. Maybe someone else in the comments can help.
how did you type that message if your keyboard wasn’t working?
Another idea is http://www.xslimmer.com/ which can remove languages and also remove the PowerPC parts of universal binaries.
Monolingual does that and input menus too.
Another one to try is MacDust (macdust.com).
Just used the trial and got almost a half gb freed up by deleting a bunch of unneeded log files. They’ve got a couple of neat looking tweaker tools built in too.
Update: Some of those cache files and logs I erased may have made made Mobile Me go crazy (60+ Sync Conflicts, mostly in iCal). Could be unrelated, but one of them was the Calendar Cache.
Monolinugal breaks Office 2008 and Adobe CS4. Make sure to exclude these files from your Monolinugal search. You can do this by going to
Monolinugal > Preferences
From here, you can add paths and manually exclude them from Monolingual. Don’t make the mistake I did!
Opps… I don’t use Office that much, but I wonder if I broke it. I guess I’ll find out the next time I go to launch it.
Thanks for adding that,
- Eric Marden
Removing language packs with Monolingual doesn’t breaks my Office 2011 and Adobe CS5.
Thanks Eric for great articles, i already saved around 1GB
It also looks like this process messed with my QuickSilver catalog… reinstalling the app now, because I can’t even launch the app to get to the preferences.
Probably a good idea to be this aggressive on a new install.
I just cleared up 3 more gigs thanks for the good blog post
My pleasure.
You are a genius! I’ve been struggling with disappearing hard disk space for quite some time. I’m still suspicious of multiple library folders but for now, this did the trick for me. Thanks!
Just thought I’d weigh in and say I just ran monolingual on my machine without excluding cs4 and after a reboot illustrator and photoshop both seem to be functioning normally….I don’t have office 2008 installed yet though….
Yeah, CS3 and Office 2008 fared okay, only my QuickSilver catalog was affected, and it was fixed with a quick re-install. Thanks for confirming with CS4.
Thanks for the help … i installed monolingual and went through the input menus…there was an item there about the keyboard…theitem was checked so i assumed that it was a safe option to allow…now my keyboard is not responding…can’t sign on, etc…please help
I’m really sorry that happened. I didn’t have that experience with monolingual, but for further support I would check with them about the issue you’re having. From reading their FAQ, it seems as if you removed the English language files along with everything else, though they don’t mention how to restore them: http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/faq.php
Sounds like you may need to re-install OS X.
If you have macports installed, you may also want to run: sudo port -u uninstall periodically. I recently freed up another GB that way.
hey eric- can you tell me an easy way to get rid of duplicate photos? i seem to have a copy of nearly every photo on my mac for some unknown reason. i could go through them one by one and delete them but hoping there’s a much faster easier way. thx!
iPhoto creates duplicates of the original for any photo you’ve edited, so be sure not to remove those. Where are the duplicates showing up? Did you accidentally copy the folder somewhere?
Is there an easy way to make iPhoto stop saving the original and the edited version? How about to delete the unedited ones?
Not really. This is the way iPhoto works, in order to enable many of its editing features. While it takes up more room, you’ll want to always be able to go back to the originals, trust me.
You can try dupguru… it’s made for detecting multiple versions of the same file.
Beware! The problem with Monolingual and Adobe CS is not that they won’t run, they will all run fine, but you will not be able to update them! Once you’ve removed the languages none of the updaters for Adobe CS aps or Office will recognise the apps you have installed and you will have to reinstall them again first.
I have been trying to download Lion OS X but it says I need 1GB more. So I have been reading posts and ended up doing CleanMyMac and paying for a 6 month subscription. But It says I still need 1GB. Am I looking at the wrong thing to clean? Do I need to buy a new 2GB kit (hard drive)? Thanks!
The “1GB” more you need is RAM, not actual disk space.
Hey, thanks so much Eric, this was really helpful
I’m in trouble.
I just used the monolingual to free up space deleting foreign languages. Trying to burn an IDVD on my snow leopard. Now I have no superdrive, but have the capability to work with IDVD projects. Any suggestions to fix the problem?
Sorry. I never ran into that and don’t have a solution readily available. A trip to the genius bar at your local apple store may be your best bet.
I adore Google (for sending me here).. and you, Eric. Your article has just found the magic GB’s that were hiding. Thank you!!
i have forgotten the password of hard disc security!!! besides i have no cd of back up…!!:( what can i do???
brilliant!!! Thanks
Where is /Library/Printers ?? In what root directory? Thanx.
In the top level ‘hard drive’. “/” is the root of that drive. If your drive is not visible on your desktop you can turn that on via Finder preferences.
Thanks a lot!!… Just found 3.75GB of space. Haven’t tried to run any programs as of yet to see if they wont work but i’ll keep you guys posted. Thanks Eric
I recently purchased a Macbook Air, and the Monolingual only cleared up 68 MB. is that because most of the packages are added from apps that are installed, or is Lion just that much more efficient? I also noticed that the entire printers library is only 200+ MB….
Later versions of OS X ship with less language files installed by default, so there is less space to reclaim. Every bit counts on those SSDs anyway
this totally worked!!! amazing. thank you, thank you, thank you!