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!
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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/
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
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.