How do i regain some GBs

Question

i would like to know how i can regain alot of my Hard drive space, have transfered all of my Photos/music and files to an External Hard drive, so there is nothing on my ibook to take up space, but my hard drive says i have 2gb of space left? how can i reagain 20gbs as i want my Ibook to be empty as i need it to travel and store photos?
thanks

Answer 1

Hi jtpulse and welcome to Apple's discussions.
You say that you have moved music and photos to an external drive. If it's not too much of a stupid question, have you deleted the originals from your iBook and emptied the trash?
You don't say how big your HD is to start with so there is no way of knowing whether 20 GB free space is a realistic target.
However you need to look carefully at what is on your iBook in a Finder window and see if there are things that you can do without.
You could also download Whatsize, a handy little application which will show in size order what you have on your HD.
You may also like to consider the following: (My apologies in advance for the fact that is a copy & paste from advice I've given on similar threads, just disregard anything that is irrelevant.)
On my iBook, I have removed GarageBand from Applications and its Loops from HD/Library/Application Support or HD/Library/Audio. As my iBook only has a combo drive and I'm not into video editing anyway I have trashed iDVD & iMovie. (Not DVD player). I have also trashed preloaded games and World Book, and its associated files.
Language support files can be removed using Monolingual. Do not remove any English language files, though.
OS X comes with a vast library of printer drivers, the large proportion of which will never be used by the average user.
Printer drivers are in the HD/Library/Printers folder. You can safely delete any named drivers that you don't have a printer for. For example, if you have a Canon, you can remove Epson, Lexmark, Hewlett Packard & Brother drivers. Epson alone takes up close to 1gb. You can even remove specific drivers from within the manufacturer's folder. For example, if you have an Epson C86 you can safely trash any other specific drivers in the Epson folder like C46, C66 etc. If, at a later date, you buy a printer whose driver you removed they can be added from your install disk, the disk that comes with the printer or downloaded.
A word of warning: More cautious heads than mine advise against messing in the HD/Library, but if you stick to the examples above, i.e. GarageBand loops, World Book and printer drivers you will be OK.
Certainly, I have had no problems with my system after removing those examples.
Check, too, in your music folder. It is possible that you have, say, 'xyz song' in the first level of your Music folder and the same song in Music/iTunes/iTunes Library. If you are sure that you do have 'xyz song' in iTunes, it is safe to delete from 'Music'. The same principle can apply to your Pictures folder and iPhoto Library, but staying with iTunes for a moment, with iTunes open select Edit in the menu bar, then 'Show duplicate songs'. You can trash duplicates if you are sure that they are true duplicates, i.e. exact name, artist and file size.
Some excellent advice has been posted by ~JB~, with corresponding words of caution.
Dr Smoke has some advice here too.
Last but by no means least, when you have finished dumping your unwanted stuff in the trash, don't forget to empty it. You haven't regained the space until you do
Definitely last this time but most important, if you are not sure whether it is safe to delete something, come back here and ask!
Have fun.
Adrian