How do I clear space on my hard drive?

I am out of space on my 80GB Macbook Air and have already deleted trash in my apps and deleted over 7,000 photos, leaving only 2,500 on my hard drive yet deleting all those photos only gave me about 1-2 more GB. Adding all of my photo, music, and other files, I show that they take up about 20GB. All of the Apps account for under 5GB. I use CCleaner and do not see duplicates in my folders. Are there hidden files somewhere? I would really appreciate help as I can no longer update any software as I've got less than 3GB available.

Affricat wrote:
Thanks for your reply. The recommended software programs are not free and so
The web page for DiskInventory X clearly states:
How much does it cost?
It is absolutely free and released under the GPL
Also, I want to thank ds store for remembering the other free app, GrandPerspective, which I couldn't remember the name of.
There is other software out there for finding duplicates, once you do you should compare them by the Version or one of the Date properties to determine which to keep. I don't really use them but you can do a search on macupdate.com, a good source of freeware/shareware. Or maybe in the Mac App Store.
Good luck!

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How can I clear space on the hard drive?

I am unable to update to Yosemite. Everytime I try, it tells me that there's not enough memory. I've tried deleting files from the startup disc, but some are unfamiliar to me so I'm afraid to delete them for fear of taking out a file the computer needs to run. It looks like I could delete Safari Web Content, however I cannot find any way to do this.

Go step by step and test.
1. Start up in Safe Mode.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11212
2. Empty Trash.
   http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13806
3. Disk space / Time Machine ?/ Local Snapshots
Local backups
   http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878
4. Delete old iOS Devices Backup.
    iTunes > Preferences > Devices
    Highlight the old Backups , press “Delete Backup” and then “OK”.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4946?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
5. Re-index Macintosh HD.
    This will take a while. Wait until it is finished.
   System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy
   http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409
6.Try OmniDiskSweeper. This will give the storage size details of the items.
       https://www.omnigroup.com/more
   Select Macintosh HD and click “Sweep Selected Drive” at the bottom.
   Delete the files yo don’t want to keep.
   Be careful. Delete only the files that can be safely be deleted.
   https://www.omnigroup.com/more
7. Move iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie media folders to an external drive.
iTunes
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201562
iPhoto
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2506
iMovie
http://support.apple.com/kb/ph2289

How do i clear movies off my hard drive ? the storage is almost full and i can't clear it ?

how do i clear movies from the hard drive on my macbook ?

Hi gpzjamie,
If you need to free up space on your Mac by deleting the movies you've downloaded from the iTunes Store, then please follow the directions below for help with deleting movies.
Mac or PC
Open iTunes.
From the Library pop-up menu, choose Movies.
Click Movies in the navigation bar.
Click the movie you want to delete.
Press Delete on your keyboard.
In iTunes 11 or later, the movie cover art will remain visible, but a Download icon will appear on it to allow you to download the item again (in countries that support this).
How to delete content you've downloaded from the iTunes Store, App Store, iBooks Store, or Mac App Store - Apple Support
Have a good one,
Alex H.

How do i clear space on my hard disk

I have a Macbook Pro that I bought in August of 2011. I set up a regular scheduled check for software updates, which have gone smoothly until recently. Now, every time that the box pops up saying that it is checking for new software updates, it finds the updates, but when I click to install them, I get another box that comes up and says "Your hard disk does not have enough space" "You need 3.57 GB of available space to download and install the updates. To increase available space, remove files from your startup disk, and then try again".
I don't understand how this could be true, as I do not use my computer for anything that could possibly take up so much space. Secondly, I wouldn't even know how to clear space on my hard disk...
HELP!

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion's Storage Display.
2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
6. See The Storage Display.
You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.
You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.

How to free up space on internal hard drive

How do I free up space on my internal hard disc?
I have only about 40 gig of information on my macbook however it says I don't have space while I'm working on photoshop. I have deleted a lot of files on my mac that are already saved in my external hard disc but when I check my memory it says I have only 1.3gig space available out of a 120gig memory. This data is distributed between audio, apps, movies, pictures and other. I don't understand what 'other' is and it says I have about 76gig worth of data in the other part. Please I would need help on how to delete files from this 'other'. Cheers!

All Mac operating systems use any free space on your hard drive as virtual memory, and this virtual memory plays a part in how well your computer performs. Because of this, the more data you have on your hard drive, the less virtual memory becomes available. Therefore, in order to help increase your Mac boot time, and keep your computer running smoothly, periodically cleaning your hard drive is necessary. To clean it up you want to get rid of any old or unnecessary files. You can do this manually by removing unused applications, emptying your trash etc.,

HT1338 how do i gain space on my hard drive?

I have over 50 gigs of "other" on my hard drive, how can i free this space?

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
See Lion's Storage Display.
You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.

How do I free space on my hard drive in Mountain Lion?

How can I free up valuable space on my start up disk a/o hard drive space. I use FCPX a lot and I think there are many temporary files that I could easily get rid of within finder. I did this once with AppleCare's but as you know using Pro applications cost $100 per incident to get help using AppleCare. Please help me. Many thanks! My specs are as follows:
                3.5 GHz i7,
               16bg DDR3,
               AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 2GB of Video,
                OSX 10.8.4,
               2 TB hard drive with only 10.56 gb free.

Hard drive getting full or near full?
Do a search for and downlaod and install OmniDisk Sweeper and OnyX.
Here are some of my tips for deleting or archiving data off of your internal hard
Have you emptied your iMac's Trash icon in the Dock?
If you use iPhoto, iPhoto has its own trash that needs to be emptied, also.
If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!
Other things you can do to gain space.
Delete any old or no longer needed emails and/or archive older emails you want to save to disc, Flash drive/s or to ext. hard drive.
Look through your Documents folder and delete any type of old useless type files like "Read Me" type files.
Again, archive to disc, Flash drive or ext. hard drive and/or delete any old documents you no longer use or immediately need.
Uninstall apps that you no longer use. If the app has a dedicated uninstaller, use it to completely uninstall the app. If the app has no uninstaller, then just drag it to the OS X Trash icon and empty the Trash.
Also, if you save old downloaded .dmg application installer files, you can either archive and delete these or just delete the ones you think you'll never install, again.
Download an app called OnyX for your version of OS X.
When you install and launch it, let it do its thing initially, then go to the cleaning and maintenance tabs and run all of the processes in the tabs. Let OnyX clean out all web browser cache files, web browser histories, system cache files, delete old error log files.
Typically, iTunes and iPhoto libraries are the biggest users of HD space.
If you have any other large folders of personal data or projects, these should be thinned out, moved, also, to the external hard drive and then either archived to disc, Flash drive or ext. hard drive and/or deleted off your internal hard drive.
Good Luck!

How to acquire more space on the Hard Drive

Hi everyone! I hope some one has the time to walk me thru steps to take to get more space on my HD. My comoputer is running very slow. I have been reading this site for info. I have a powerbook G4, 867 MHz, 1 GB SDRAM, only 40 gig HD. I run, iphoto, CS2, mail and safari. I only edit digital photos and do email and surfing.
I read from a post to delete the console log from finder. I clicked on the HD icon and went to library/logs/console and delete some things from it. I hope I didn't screw up.
I have deleted some languages and lots and lots of docs etc.
I am wondering if I should get rid of the dash board widgets? would that help? I never use them. if so how do I do that??
I feel stupid for having to ask this probably very basic question but I sure hope someone will help me.
Thanks alot
Diana

General clean up is never a bad idea if you are careful about what you get rid of. However, if you are running out of space you should concentrate on getting rid of larger files. There are a number of ways to do this built-in to "OS X", two of them are using the Option-F Finder key and specifying file size, etc. and using the terminal (my preference being an old Unix-junkie).
There are also applications made for this. Easiest might be DiskSweeper (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/), you can use it for free - just have to delete the files yourself. Again, know what something is before you delete it.
Oh, and an external hard drive is always a good idea. I try to move most of my non-speed critical files off the main drive to maintain a healthy drive.

Why when I delete photos (from disk) does it not clear space on my hard drive?

I went from 800 photos to 51 and my available HD space remains the same. So in total I deleted about 750 20+MB files. I should have more space free on my hard drive but there is nothing. I make sure to choose "delete from disk" as opposed to just "remove" so I can't imagine the problem. I even went back in and erased back ups in the lightroom folder wondering if maybe the images were hiding out there. Deleting back up folders made nominal difference. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Rob,
You are right. It was GB not MB. I am sure the disk I am looking at is the correct one. I go to the apple, about this mac, more info, storage. Unfortunately I just hit empty trash over and over without looking to see if the files made it in. It has always cleared space before so I assumed it would this time. I do think they made it as I always heard the sound of the trash clearing but I did not actually look for the files first.
I did a lot of research yesterday as to what could be going on and found an article that said time machine backs up locally on my HD and if I want space I can disable that. I found the folder with the back ups and saw there were many. I followed the tutorial online and disabled the back ups and now the folder is gone so you would think- more space. Not one single GB was returned.
I ended up erasing music and photos from iPhoto and a few movies and space cleared when I did those things. Still wondering what happened and want the other space back. 750 raw files is a lot of space, or should be.
Wondering if there is some back up to the back up somewhere.....
Thanks for responding .. I will take all input I can get!

How did the used space on my hard drive increase so fast?

I just bought a new laptop at Best Buy and when I first got it I had 280gb of 285gb free space on my harddrive. After only a few days and no new progams or hardware installed, it now says that I only have 247gb of 285gb free space.
How did this happen? The only thing I can think of is a Windows Update that took place - but I doubt that would take up so much hard drive space?
Thanks for any help.

I'm not really sure without looking at the unit. My best suggestion, have the Geek Squad at your local store check it out.
Adam
Best Buy Community - Retail, Americas
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How do I save space in my hard drive when importing pictures into lightroom

Hi, I keep my images in one internal drive and I have light room in my main drive. When I import pictures from the other internal drive, am I taking up space in my main drive which has limited space. I only want to keep the applications, such as lightroom in one drive and store my images in the other drive. I do not want to duplicate the images and use up my limited space in the main drive that has my operating system and applications

Ask in the LR forum how to manage your catalogs.
Mylenium

Deleted files not clearing space on my hard drive

I'm running iMovieHD v6.0.3 on an old PowerPC G5. Things have always run smoothly until now. When I started editing my most recent video, I had 191GB left on a 500GB hard drive. Whenever I deleted any clips, my trash file size went immediately to 6.73GB - 191GB Available. I edited this movie down from 45 minutes to 13 minutes and the same amount of space showed up in my trash (6.73GB) and hard drive (191GB left) as when the project began.
I thought I may just have a single corrupt/buggy session, but this is happening now in a newer iMovie session. Command+i on my hard drive still says it has 191GB of free space - after deleting almost one hour of video. All trash is empty and the deleted files seem to be gone. What is wrong?
BTW - I'm new here and not the biggest techie around, so please type slowly. Thanks.
Kevin

If any part of your edited clip remains in your iMovie project, then the discarded part also will remain, whether or not you empty the trash. As Bengt points out, this is non-destructive editing. If you discard the entire clip, so that no part of it remains in the project, then emptying the trash will free up space.
A workaround is to export to your desktop the retained portion of the edited clip to Quicktime movie, and then import the resulting Quicktime movie back into your iMovie project. That creates a new clip. You can then delete the retained portion of the old clip, and when you empty the trash it will be deleted along with the edited parts that you previously removed, and space will be freed up. You also can wait until your iMovie project is completed, then send the whole project to Quicktime and import back in. Then when you empty the trash you will free up space. Further editing will be somewhat limited, however.
Note: Whenever you permanently delete a clip, be sure that you have a back up copy somewhere on your drive if you think you might want to re-edit it or reference it in some way.

How do I recover space on my hard drive after installing Lion

My hard disk is full after installing Lion - before it had 80 GB free out of 320 GB.
Maybe it happened during the disabling of File Vault from Snow Leopard - I had to move a lot of files to get space enough for decrypting before using the encryption on Lion.
I have seen somewhere that the multi version way of saving files is what takes up the space and that it can be disabled.
How?

Are you sure you don't have duplicate copies of the things you moved?
Did the old sparsebundle containing the encrypted version of your home folder get deleted?
If you're using Time Machine, the space may be taken up by Local snapshots. See #30 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

How do you clear space on hard drive

How do you clear space on your hard drive on a mac book pro?

Hope this helps.
1. Empty Trash.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10677
2. Delete "Recovered Messages", if any.
    Hold the option key down and click "Go" menu in the Finder menu bar.
    Select "Library" from the dropdown.
    Library > Mail > V2 > Mailboxes
    Delete "Recovered Messages", if any.
    Empty Trash. Restart.
3. Repair Disk
    Steps 1 through 7
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5836
4. For more on this and very helpful tips:
    http://pondini.org/OSX/DiskSpace.html
    http://pondini.org/OSX/LionStorage.html

Space on my hard drive:

Hi all,
I have a Macbook and was wondering how to free up space on my hard drive. A guy at the Mac store here in Ottawa suggests moving stuff to my back up drive. What should I move? How do I move it there? I have 15 Gb free on my hard drive - should I even be concerned?
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Richard

As a rule of thumb you need 10 GBs or 15% of your hard drive's capacity as free space whichever is greater.
Your choices are:
1. Install a larger hard drive in your computer.
2. Purchase another external drive to which you can move data off of the main hard drive.
3. Delete data files you no longer need.
4. Repartition your existing backup drive to accommodate both a backup volume and a storage volume.
Do not copy files to your backup drive to free up space. As soon as you delete them from your main hard drive your backup program will delete them from the backup drive, and they will be lost. If you really need to move stuff to the backup drive, then you should re-partition it and make another volume to use for storage. You would then have two volumes/partitions on the drive - one for backup and one for storage. Your backup partition must be large enough to backup your entire main hard drive. If you use Time Machine then your backup partition should be at least twice the size of your main hard drive.

How do I clear space on my hard drive?

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