Startup Disk Space

My startup disk is filled almost to capacity and I'm looking to free up some more space. I've noticed that two of the main folders, Library and System, on the disk contain essentially the same files. When I click on the System folder I get a Library subfolder that contains pretty much the same files as does the main Library folder. Can I just delete one of these libraries to free up space? Are there any better ways to free up startup disk space?

1. No.
2. Move items such as your iTunes and iPhoto libraries to another drive. The volume containing the iPhoto library needs to be formatted as Mac OS Extended.
(115847)

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What do I need to do if my startup disk space is full

what do I need to do if my startup disk space is full

Here are a couple of good primers:
Where did my Disk Space go?
http://macmost.com/what-to-do-when-your-hard-drive-is-full.html

How to free up startup disk space

This is my first Mac and I love it but between my mom and I using it I have no startup disk space left on my Mac. I have no idea how to fix it, when I look to see what is using up space it says "other" 130 GB of other. What should I do? I live like 2 hours away from an apple store so at home solutions would be great! thanks
seriously fustrated
tech girl

Other data is going to include
Doucuments
Application data
Aplication Preferences
Emails
The operating system
System files
config files
The best way to reduce this space is deleting old email which may be in the thousands
Also old documents and old folders that dont get used

How do I gain startup disk space

Sorry for what is probably a stupid question ... I ran the usual software update and when I tried to install the Mac OSX update, I got a message that "Your hard disk does not have enough space" and "You need 5.19 GB of available space to download and install the updates. To increase available space, remove files from your startup disk, and then try again. "
But I have no idea how to access my startup disk (I didn't even know I had one). How do I find it and how do I choose which files can be deleted safely?
Thanks for any advice for this novice.
J

A few suggestions:
Empty the trash!
Open up your application folder & go through all your apps. Trash all the apps you no longer want and/or use.
An easier way to do this is to open the Application folder in list view & press the Command+j keys.
In the the dialog that appears, click the "This Window Only" button & the "Calculate All Sizes" check box.
Wait a bit until your file & folder sizes have all been calculated, then click the "Size" column to sort your apps from the fattest to the most anorexic.
Get rid of all your photo files you don't want and/or need. Same goes for those pics off the websites you downloaded (gifs, jpegs, etc.).
I'm old fashion. I still keep my photos in a photo album. So when people come over my house, they can actually "touch" & "feel" my photos without me running to my computer to "show my photos".
Get rid of all your music files you no longer listen too. Especially, if you already have the actual CD/DVDs or you can later redownload from a website.
Use Spotlight to make sure you got rid of everything. You can even trash directly from Spotlight!
Drag what you don't want and/or need to the trash. Better yet, download this neat little shareware app demo called AppZapper. It basically does all the work for you by not only trashing the apps but the apps preference files, caches & all its associated files.
Another software that does the above is AppDelete. Best of all this software is free!
Burn what you want and/or need onto CDs or DVDs.
Not everyone has the luxury of purchasing an external HD and/or Mobile accounts to store their "stuff, junk, music & photos".
You can check with your ISP to see if they offer free storage space. Most if not all do now-a-days.
There are thousands if not millions of free storage facilities on the web also. Use your favorite search engine to search them out as they come in different storage sizes to fit your needs & wants.
Check for duplicate fonts.
Applications>Font Book
Select “All Fonts”
If you see any “black dots” next to any fonts this mean you have duplicates and/or multiple versions of these fonts.
To clean this up, select a “black dotted” font or the Apple + click to select multiple dotted fonts;
Edit>Resolve>Duplicates.
What the above does is turns off the duplicates & multiple version fonts. Not delete them.
More than likely the “extras” were installed by other programs and/or other users.
Clear out font caches
Use FontNuke. It does all the work for you. And, best of all it’s FREE.
Printer Drivers
Get rid of all the printer drivers you don’t need & use except the ones for your current printer(s)/scanner(s).
HD>Library>Printers Folder
If you accidently threw something out that you needed for your printer/scanner it can be easily obtained from the manufacturer’s website and/or from the CD that came w/the printer/scanner.
Garage Band
Has about 1GB of loops stored. Get rid of some some them. You surely don’t use, like and/or need them all.
HD>Library>Audio/Apple Loops>Apple>Apple Loops For GarageBand
Or just get rid of the Garage Band app altogether if you don’t use it.
Get rid of extra languages
Strip your computer down to your “native” tongue.
You can do this with a FREE utility called Monolingual. Another app that apparently does all the work for you. I’ve never used it. However, a lot of users here swear by & recommend it highly.
However, there is a warning for *native English speakers*. Make sure you keep BOTH English and English (United States).
Other Resources:
HD Space Checkers:
Disk Inventory X (FREE)
WhatSize (SHAREWARE)
OmniDiskSweeper (FREE)
GrandPerspective (FREE - donation)
Knowledge Base Article http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303602 Mac Maintenance Quick Assist
Scroll down to "4) Prune Through Your Files".
Slimming your hard drive
Rule of thumb: You should never let your hard drive get to where you have only 10-15% of space left.
!http://i50.tinypic.com/izvwo1.gif!

HT201364 How do you free up startup disk space on mac book pro 2013 model its not letting me update anything at all

how do you free up disk space on macbook pro 2013 model to upgrade and update software

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' 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.
Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

A private var folder is taking up all of my startup disk space and I can't delete it.

HI,
My startup disk usage jumped to full quite unexpectedly. On running 'daisy disk' I can see that most of the space has been taken up with files marked as:
Disks and folders/macintosh hd/private/var/vm followed by a whole lot of 'swap file' extensions (34.3 GB in total)
and
folders/macintosh hd/private/var/db
What are these large files, and how do I delete them? Daisy disk says that they are required by OsX- but they weren't there before-
Alison

Shutdown the computer. Wait 30 seconds then restart. See if anything has changed. The swap files should be deleted. The main reason you may have such large swap is because you are running out of memory from trying to run to many applications concurrently.
Do not do anything with the /private/var/db file. The system needs that file.
There are many things that can take up space on a hard drive:
Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' 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.
Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

My Macbook Pro keeps on saying that my disk space is full (startup Disk space) how or what do I need to do to resolve this as it is preventing me downloading all software updates?

Can someone help?

it actually says this "You need 5.34 GB of available space to download and install the updates. To increase available space, remove files from your startup disk, and then try again."
Don't even know how to do what it is asking me to do, can I get some direction?

Startup Disk: Deleted files but space dwindled from 2G to 300MB.

Hi guys,
My Mac Air's Startup Disk space is full. So I have deleted 6G worth of files, applications etc. yesterday. Oddly, my available disk space dwindled from the original 2G to 500MB. In 30 mins, it went down to 300MB even though I did not install anything new. Searching for an answer, I ran disk utility to verify the disk - hoping it will fix any errors. There were no errors - HD was ok. BUT, the available space now dwinded to 86MB - after Disk Utility.
It is puzzling and I hope to find out why and how to regain my disk space to use my mac air
thanks in advance for taking the time to read and respond to this question.

OS X 10. 7 Lion / 10.8 Mountain Lion / 10.9 Mavericks
About “Other”:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6047
Try these tips.
1. Start up in Safe Mode.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11212
2. Empty Trash.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10677
3. 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.
4. Disk space / Time Machine ?/ Local Snapshots
Local backups
   http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878
5. 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
6. Re-index Macintosh HD
   System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy
   http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409
7. For more on this and very helpful tips:
    http://pondini.org/OSX/LionStorage.html

Startup disk almost full on brand new laptop - Impossible - Help!

I bought my MacBook Air about a month ago. I have not dowloaded any movies, music, or apps. I have a couple thousand photos stored on the laptop and microsoft office- that is ALL. I am receiving an error message saying my startup disk is almost full. There is absolutely NO WAY this is possible. It is practically a brand new and unused laptop. However, I did initially use "Mail" as my inbox for several email accounts. I took all my accounts offline as "Mail" moved all my emails on all my accounts into the archives folders. Now even when I log into gmail from a web browser, all my inbox and sent messages are located in the archives folders.
My question is:
1- How do I make more room on my startup disk space, as this is clearly an error.
2- How do I recover my emails from my archive folders?
Please help. Any advise would be appreciated.

About “Other”:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6047
Try these tips.
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/PH10677
3. 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.
4. Repair Disk
    Steps 1 through 7
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5836
5. Disk space / Time Machine ?/ Local Snapshots
Local backups
   http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878
6. Delete old iOS Devices Backup, if any.
    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
7. Re-index Macintosh HD.
   System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy
   http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409

Startup disk memory

My Macbook Pro is out of startup disk space. What should I do? Can I add space?

inside. see here as an example. http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Early+2011+Hard+Drive+Re placement/5119
Unless you have a very new model?

Problems with "Startup Disk Memory"

I'm having issues with hard drive storage.
My spotify account is telling me it can't play music because my hard drive is full. Applications won't run because my "startup disk space is full." I can't download ANYTHING because there is no space.
Before anyone tells me to delete some files, I have already backed up all my files and deleted ALL OF THEM. The only thing on my computer at the moment is my software. Does anyone have a solution to this problem? I'm at the end of my rope. My computer is basically good for nothing right now. I'm also having extreme problems booting it up, and connecting to Wi-Fi. I'm running Lion OS X, fyi.

I'm having issues with hard drive storage.
My spotify account is telling me it can't play music because my hard drive is full. Applications won't run because my "startup disk space is full." I can't download ANYTHING because there is no space.
Before anyone tells me to delete some files, I have already backed up all my files and deleted ALL OF THEM. The only thing on my computer at the moment is my software. Does anyone have a solution to this problem? I'm at the end of my rope. My computer is basically good for nothing right now. I'm also having extreme problems booting it up, and connecting to Wi-Fi. I'm running Lion OS X, fyi.

Startup Disk Full Message Keeps Occuring

I'm new at maintaining our Xserve here at work. It seems that each day the serevr gets incapacitated because the Startup Disk space fills up. I keep deleting log files and other files that are temporary, but to no avail. I can free a Gig or 2 then a day or two alter it's full again. Is there something wrong with the configuration?

You found a disk-full message and, well, piled onto the thread. OK. There's a decent shot that there is no connection to the previous disk-full error, too. If you lift the hood and look at the Unix layers, there are a large number of files being written, and many differing triggers for general or for excessive disk consumption.
As was mentioned earlier in the thread, this likely isn't specific to Xserve hardware, and this is probably a generic Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server issue, too; something occurring within the Unix layer of the platform. Something writing a log. Caching. A run-away process. Etc.
Get the [Grand Perspective tool|http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net> as a start. That can show you where your space is going.
Also launch Terminal.app and use the shell commands:
find / -size 1k -print+
sudo du -sHh /*
mdfind 'kMDItemFSSize > 10000000'
The first shows files larger than 1K, the second shows disk space. There are commands around to sort this stuff, too; to rank your use as output by du. That last one, the mdfind command, is a (fast) Mac search command that works reasonably well as part of a pipe.
And 150 gigabytes? That's comparatively tiny. I'm running 750 GB drives on servers that are now three years old. Go get yourself actual disk storage devices. Smaller drives can sometimes be used for high performance, but SSD is infiltrating that usage. The tiny SAS disks that were sold with various Xserve boxes were built for speed and bandwidth (as HDDs go), and aren't so good for storage or for sharing the operating system installation with, for instance, users.
And if it's log files, have a look at what's going on as - as is typical with many of these cases - the log can be filling because there's an error somewhere. And the specific trigger for the error can by most anything. Do your due diligence as a Unix server administrator and find your big file(s) and have a look at what's going on with your Unix server, in other words.
Also try a few Google searches, as this problem is a common one, and there are any number of discussions around of various find and du and mdfind and other commands that can be used here. It'd be nice if there was an integrated and GUI-friendly mechanism within Mac OS X, but that's not available; it's add-on or Unix shell commands for now...

Lost Disk space after Reinstalling Leopard

I upgraded my Mac OS v.10.4.9 to Leopard v.10.5.1 in May and after Leopard was installed I had about 13 GB HD space left. It was lightning quick too. The new OS was v.10.5.1
Since then I've been downloading regular Security updates as they were prompted until the OS reached v.10.5.5 but the whole thing was gradually getting slower too so I figured I would reinstall Leopard and take it back to v.10.5.1 to see if it was back to the high speed it had when I originally installed Leopard v.10.5.1.
After I re-installed Leopard last week and it was back to v.10.5.1 it went back to running superfast again, but yesterday I started getting a notice that said I was running low on Startup disk space and I needed to delete some stuff to gain space.
When I checked available space I have less than 1 GB, about 300MB.
It seems that by re-installing Leopard it has been written adjacent to the 10.5.5 instead of on top of it, which I thought it would do automatically.
I found a file named 'Previous systems' on the HD and deleted that but it screwed it up so I had to restore that and now it's back to normal but I've still got less than 1 GB disk space.
Can anyone tell me how to delete my old operating systems (both the 10.5.5 and the 10.4.9 that I presume is still on there, which I originally upgraded to Leopard.)
I'm a conservative user of disk space and I deleted all my photos and only gained about 20 MB of new space so I'm pretty sure the problem is the OS's are written adjacent to each other instead of on top of each other.

Barry,
Thank you for your help.
When I deleted the Previous Systems file it was about 7 months after the Leopard installation.
You are right, I did do an Archive and Install in order to maintain all my info from v10.4.9.
The problem I encountered after I deleted the Previous Systems file was I then did a Secure Empty Trash and as it was emptying it was showing over 200,000 items and still upticking and that worried me that I had done the wrong thing by deleting the Previous Systems file.
So I stopped the Emptying process, and did a restart, thinking my HD space may be restored if the file was indeed possible to be deleted.
When it restarted that time, instead of the usual boot up process, there was a small flashing square box in the centre of a grey background, the small box had a blue earth in it and that went on flashing for maybe 20 minutes.
It eventually booted up and so I went to the trash, where the now presumably slightly diminished Previous Systems file was, and I dragged that file back into the HD and re-started the machine.
The world sign again flashed on, but this time for maybe only 10 minutes before it booted OK.
I checked and I was back to v.10.5.1 bit still with only about 300MB Disk space.
That's when I deleted all my photos but that only gave me about 20MB so now I'm up to about 320 MB - but as you say that is nowhere near enough.
But I do notice a definite increase in speed using 10.5.1 compared to 10.5.5. Those Security Updates have dragged it down badly.
Now that you have explained that the Previous Systems file may be safely deleted then I will try that again and let it run its course this time.
I'll let you know what happens.
Thanks again,
ann

Clear startup disk

I have received a warning that there is no room on my startup disk and that it is full. How do I delete things from it? I am having issues with photo storage - I purchased an external hard drive and saved all of my photos to it. I then deleted most of my photos from the computer. Today, however when importing photos (a fraction of what was removed) my computer notified me it was low on startup disk space and then an hour later (no additional photos saved to computer) that it was full. What is going on here? If anyone has a clue and thinks they can help, I would be much obliged!

For information about the Other category in the Storage display, see this support article. If the Storage display seems to be inaccurate, try rebuilding the Spotlight index.
Empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. If you use iPhoto, empty its internal Trash first:
iPhoto ▹ Empty Trash
Do the same in other applications, such as Aperture, that have an internal Trash feature. Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space.
According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB of available space on the startup volume (as shown in the Finder Info window) for normal operation. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of the data. There is little or no performance advantage to having more available space than the minimum Apple recommends. Available storage space that you'll never use is wasted space.
When Time Machine backs up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as Backups. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself. If you followed bad advice to disable local snapshots by running a shell command, you may have ended up with a lot of data in the Other category. Reboot and it should go away.
See this support article for some simple ways to free up storage space.
You can more effectively use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) or GrandPerspective (GP) to explore the volume and find out what's taking up the space. You can also delete files with it, but don't do that unless you're sure that you know what you're deleting and that all data is safely backed up. That means you have multiple backups, not just one. Note that ODS only works with OS X 10.8 or later. If you're running an older OS version, use GP.
Deleting files inside an iPhoto or Aperture library will corrupt the library. Any changes to a photo library must be made from within the application that created it. The same goes for Mail files.
Proceed further only if the problem isn't solved by the above steps.
ODS or GP can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.
Back up all data now.
If you have more than one user account, make sure you're logged in as an administrator. The administrator account is the one that was created automatically when you first set up the computer.
Install the app you downloaded in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click anywhere in the corresponding line of text below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C:
sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
sudo /Applications/GrandPerspective.app/Contents/MacOS/GrandPerspective
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.
The application window will open, eventually showing all files in all folders, sorted by size. It may take a few minutes for the app to finish scanning.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance.
When you're done with the app, quit it and also quit Terminal.

My startup disk is full. Can I delete 16,255 Google RSS feeds in Mail screen?

I began to investigate all avenues to free up my startup disk space. This included deleting photos, movies, downloads, emptying trash, etc. I saved 15.87 GB out of the original 500 GB Mac hard drive. (By the way, everything was backed up to an external 1 TB hard drive). At best, deleting more photos may save me another 5 GB of HDD. Still a drop in the bucket. I then noticed that in my mail screen I have 16,255 Google RSS feeds. I only have 162 Apple Hot and the 16,255 Google RSS feeds. Can I delete the Google feeds and thereby free up disk space by doing that? I still want to use Google and not lose it permanently. Will it work?

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' 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.
Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

Startup Disk Space

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