Free up space on start up disk

I keep getting a start up disk is full message and am unable to download upgrades. How do I free up space on the start up disk?

You may have large libraries of photos, music and movies. If so move them to an external HD, Apple explains how in:
iMovie: How to move the Library to an EHD
iPhoto: How to move the Library to an EHD
iTunes: How to move the library to an EHD

Similar Messages

How do I free up space on start up disk?

I have deleted trash in all applications but still says I am out of space in start up disk? How do I free up 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.
See Where did my Disk Space go?.
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.

Start up disk full message, how do i free up space?, start up disk full message, how do i free up space?

Got a popup message 'startup disk full' - what do I do to create more space? My son tried to download some movies for me and there wasn't enough room...

"what do I do to create more space?"
Get rid of and/or archive files that take up space and/or you don't need. How much free space is left on the hard drive?

How to free space in start up disk in Snow leopard... please give step by step process

how to free space in start up disk in Snow leopard... please give step by step process someone help me ......

What's taking up all your space? To find out, click finder in your dock, the select your home user. This will display your user folders. Start by selecting your music folder by clicking it once, then the space bar on your key board. This will open a window display this files size.    Take note of the size of the following folders:
     1. Music
     2. Movies
     3. Pictures
     4. Downloads
This will help you determine where you space is going.
Once you have determined that.... deside what you want to delete or move in order to save space. Moving Library's to external drives is often the best way to free up space.
For iPhoto Libraries, see - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1229
For iTunes Libaries, see - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449
For iMove Events, see - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1026 and http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iMovie/8.0/en/19555.html
NOTE - With iMovie events, ensure you "move" the events, not just copy them as shown in the second article
Also go through your applications folder, and delete any unwanted applications.
Ensure your downloads folder is empty or unwanted downloads deleated
Ensure your iPhoto Trash is empty http://www.ehow.com/how_4501773_empty-trash-iphoto.html
Finally ensure your Trash is empty by clicking "finder" in the top menu directly beside the apple, and selecting "empty trash"
Hope that helps

HT201364 Free up memory space on start up disk

How do you remove items from start up disk to free memory space?

You should never, EVER let a conputer hard drive get completely full, EVER!
With Macs and OS X, you shouldn't let the hard drive get below 15 GBs or less of free data space.
If it does, it's time for some hard drive housecleaning.
Follow some of my tips for cleaning out, deleting and archiving data from your Mac's internal hard drive.
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 store images in other locations other than iPhoto, then you will have to weed through these to determine what to archive and what to delete.
If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!
Delete any old or no longer needed emails and/or archive to disc, flash drives or external hard drive, older emails you want to save.
Look through your other Mailboxes and other Mail categories to see If there is other mail you can archive and/or delete.
Other things you can do to gain space.
Once you have around 15 GBs regained, do a search, download and install OmniDisk Sweeper.
This app will help you locate files that you can move/archive and/or delete from your system.
STAY AWAY FROM DELETING ANY FILES FROM OS X SYSTEM FOLDER!
Look through your Documents folder and delete any type of old useless type files like "Read Me" type files.
Again, archive to disc, flash drives, ext. hard drives or delete any old documents you no longer use or immediately need.
Look in your Applications folder, if you have applications you haven't used in a long time, if the app doesn't have a dedicated uninstaller, then you can simply drag it into the OS X Trash icon. IF the application has an uninstaller app, then use it to completely delete the app from your Mac.
Download an app called OnyX for your version of OS X.
When you install and launch it, let it do its initial automatic tests, then go to the cleaning and maintenance tabs and run the maintenance tabs that 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.
move these files/data off of your internal drive to the external hard drive and deleted off of the internal hard drive.
If you have any other large folders of personal data or projects, these should be archived or moved, also, to the optical discs, flash drives or external hard drive and then either archived to disc and/or deleted off your internal hard drive.
Good Luck!

HT201364 How can i free up space on my startup disk to install OS X Mavericks?

How can i free up space on my start up disk to install the OS X Mavericks software?

For information about the Other category in the Storage display, see this support article.
Empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. If you use iPhoto, empty its internal Trash first:
iPhoto ▹ Empty Trash
Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space. Do the same in other applications, such as Aperture, that have an internal Trash feature.
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 your 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.
If you're using Time Machine to back up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of files you've recently deleted. 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.
See this support article for some simple ways to free up storage space.
You can more effectively use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) to explore your 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.
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 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 ODS in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click anywhere in the 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
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 with the largest at the top. It may take a few minutes for ODS to finish scanning your files.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything while running ODS 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 ODS, quit it and also quit Terminal.

Freeing up space on start up disk- compressing files- then what?

I want to free up space on my start up disk. Commpressing files was suggested. I compressed a folder and now I have the original 15GB and the zip 14.42 GB. How does that help?
Do I delete the original?
Thanks,
Roberta

You need to understand compression and various compression algorithms to save space by compression.
First of all, compression does not work well on things already compressed (such as most of the video format and pictures such as jpg), so if you are trying to compress a folder containing a lot of videos and images, you will almost gain nothing. Compression best works with text as you can encode text quite easily.
Then, there are different compression algorithms and levels of compression. For example in general default zip would try to use medium level of CPU and generate medium sized zip files. For example for a folder containing 100 MB of text, the zipped version can be around 10 MB.
On the other hadn 7z LZMA2 compression is one of the best compressions for plain text and could easily compress 100 MB of text to 1 MB (especially if it is repetitive), making you have a 100x gain.
Returning back to your original question, yes, you should delete the original folder after you generate the zip. However,
1- Never compress and/or delete a system folder as when you delete it your system won't function properly.
2- If you need something from the compressed folder, you will need to first uncompress it (which requires the original space) get the requires file and possibly delete it again. So, normally compression works best for things you really don't use in a day-to-day basis so that you can once compress them and just ignore them.
For more information about 7zip and LZMA format see: http://sixtyfive.xmghosting.com/products/7zx/
If you can give me details of the files/folder you want to compress, again I can provide more information.

Need more space on start up disk-

I need to make more space on my start up disk- I want to erase and start up using lion 10.7 that is in my itunes app - if i erase will that be deleted too?

If you're talking about formatting your hard drive it will erase everything on the partition your format. Try installing Lion first, or removing some software, photos, applications, etc.

How do I make space on start-up disk

Hi,
I recently upgraded to Lion X. Now I keep getting notices that my start-up disk is almost full. How do I make more space? I'm afraid of deleting things that are important for my Mac. Please break it down for me step by step. This is my first Mac, so I'm not too familiar with this laptop or Lion X. Thanks.
Hilda

Hilda,
Generally, anything in visible folders under your user name in the finder will be documents that you can safely move to an external drive or delete. You should see separate folders for Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music, Pictures, etc. None of the files in these folders should be critical to the operation of your mac.
Safest bet is to get an external drive and move things like pictures and movies off of your main drive. These can be especially large files and take up a lot of space. What I do is build a similar group of folders on the external drive, and that makes it easy to keep things organized. Make sure you move the files or copy and then erase as OS X does a copy by default.
Also, check to make sure your trash is empty, and your downloads folder, it can get full of dmg images and other typical downloads, and most of these can be safely erased unless you don't have access to the original source any more. Hope this helps.

Need help clearing space on start up disk

I've had messages pop up before saying that I needed to clear space on my MacBook Pro (I've had it since 2009), so i've been trying to get rid of as much as possible to clear up space. I've managed to free up some space however the availability keeps changing about 10 minutes ago it said I had around 10 GB of space and it just changed to 1.13 GB. I feel like i've done everything I possibly can to get more space; not only have I gone throughf and deleted almost everything from my computer, but i've also run disk repairs too. Nothing seems to help. I'd like to upgrade my OS x Snow Leopard to OS x Mountain Lion, but at this point I don't have enough memory to do so. If anyone has any suggestions I would love the help.
Thanks!

Down load from the Internet OmnioDiskSweeper (free) and open it. It will show all of your files and the respective sizes. Delete what you do not want. you may find that you have more room than you think.
To corroborate the actual space on your MBO, you can click COMMAND I (the letter i) on the HDD icon on your desk top and it will show a display showing space used and available. This ca also be seen on Disk Utility.
Ciao.

HT201364 what is the best way to create more space on start up disk?

I am trying to upgrade Mac OS X to 10.9 to improve syncronisation between MAC and Ipad. However I am getting the message "startup disk almost full". I was wondering how I can create more space without deleting programs and files that are important to the functionality of my MAC. Knowing what to delete would be helpful but I am a little worried that I might delete somethng very important without being able to retrieve it, if necessay. I have a 500GB WD external hard drive if that helps in answering my question. Thanks in advance for any bright spark that can answer this question.
Andy

You should always maintain an absolute minimum of 10 - 15 GB of empty space in order for the OS to function properly. If you do video editing, then you should have a lot more - at least as many GB free as you have temporary files in your project (an hour of HD video project could easily amass more than 100 GB). So, follow Linc's link. You can also permanently move your iPhoto library to an external disk:
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2506

How do i free up space on my startup disk?

I'm trying to do a software update and I'm getting the message "Please free up some space on your startup diak". How do I do this with my MacBook Pro?
Thanks!

Excellent resource here:
Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk

HT3680 how to free up space if startup disk is full

How do I free up space when the startup disk is full?

O Trejo, greetings;
I am not the Wizard but a mere citizen of Oz who wears green tinted glasses as all others do.
DaisyDisk appears to perform a similar function as OmniDiskSweeper which I still prefer due probably due to my familiarity with it.
I am not familiar with OSX Server, so I am off the hook on this one. If you go to the OSX Server forum, there will be forum members who will be able to address your query. This is the link:
https://discussions.apple.com/community/servers_enterprise_software/os_x_server
If you are really nice to them, they may give you a Dog Yummy.
Ciao.

How/where do i check out what is eating up all my start up disk?

First, .. ignore what my profile says about what i am running.I have two iMacs both running leopard OS. I bought a family pack--allows up to five computers-- of snow leoapard OS but i can't load it until i delete stuff off of my two computers. What/how is the best way to go about this?

HI,
Go here for help to Free Up Space on Your Startup Disk
You can get Omni Disk Sweeper to see the size of files and where they are stored. Another good utillity is What Size
I highly recommend you check out this link before installing Snow Leopard. Topic : When updating to 10.6 or 10.6.1 please remember the following
Please take a moment and click My Settings on the right side of this page and tell us which Mac you have and which Mac OS X version you are running. That way your forum profile is available.
Carolyn

Received message that my start up disk is almost full. Where is this located and how do I know what I can delete?

Received a message that my start up disk is almost full. Where do I locate my start up disk / files and how do I know what i can delete from this folder to make more space?

Start up disk is the main, and only, internal disk of your computer.
I hope you know what you saved on it, so you also know what can be removed

Free up space on start up disk

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for