How can I tell what is taking up space on my HD

Question

I am a PC switcher. Even though it has been over a year it is still new to me. I noticed today that my hard drive only has 8.5 gig left on it. I find that hard to beleive. Neverthless, how can I find out what is taking up the bulk of my space? Is there a utility or something?
Also, I know I have some movies, in my ituns. Can I put the movies on my external and keep the music on my HD?

Answer 1

Basically, the DMGs if any are just a shot in the dark. I store stuff on my Mac as .dmg files, it's just a disk image. But unless you use the sparse method you 'might' end up creating a DVD image with only a few files on. So you have 4.38GB which is as far as the finder is concerned is accounted for even if it's unused.
We need to see where the space is being taken up. Open finder window and have it so your home folder and its contents are open. You can do a get info on each, (select and press command-I) or use the inspector which I find better when browsing. Select say your desktop, then press and hold Command and Option?Alt and then press I.
At the moment my home folder is;
Desktop 6.4Mb
Docs 376 KB
Downloads 58.6MB
Library 139 MB
Movies 160KB
Music 3.8MB
Pictures 306.9MB
Public 0KB
Sites 40KB.
Now my music and important data are on a separate internal drive so that if I have to take the Mac in for repairs or do a complete erase and reinstall of the OS then the data is untouched.
Also, shutdown and restart. then once started up open Activity Monitor and see if anything has eaten drive space that you use or whether its hidden activity.
Anything not look right to you on yours?
Message was edited by: gumsie
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