How to clear files off my startup disk?

HELP?

Here are some general tips to keep your Mac's hard drive trim and slim as possible
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 Mac'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.
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.
To find other large files, download an app called Omni Disk Sweeper.
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!

Similar Messages

How can I remove files from the startup disk

I am getting a screen when I am trying to quit saying the "MAC OS X startup disk has no more space available for application memory" by closing the windows and removing files from the startup disk will help.
How do I do this?

That error message is misleading. Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
You don't have enough memory installed for your usage pattern.
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination.
In the Activity Monitor application, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If you don't see that column, select
View ▹ Columns ▹ Real Memory
from the menu bar.
If one process (excluding "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more real memory over time without ever releasing it. Here is an example of how it's done.
The process named "Safari Web Content" renders web pages for Safari and other applications. It uses a lot of memory and may leak if certain Safari extensions or third-party web plugins are installed. Consider it a prime suspect.
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.
The next suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details.

TS1702 how do i delete from the startup disk? I am trying to get Mountain Lion from the App store and it says that the purchase was not complete because i need 4.06 GB space to download OS x 10.8. and to remove items from my startup disk to increase space

how do i delete from the startup disk? I am trying to get Mountain Lion from the App store and it says that the purchase was not complete because i need 4.06 GB space to download OS x 10.8. and to remove items from my startup disk to increase space. How?
Thanks

You can use iCloud with 10.7.5. You do not need to upgrade to Yosemite. You should provide a minimum of 15 GBs of free space or 10% of the hard drive's capacity, whichever is greater.
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.

How to clear file history in Teststand file menu?

How to clear file history in Teststand "file" menu?
Thanks!

Hey Jacky,
I have found a Knowledgebase
that I believe describes what you are looking for. The registry
key may be different depending on which version of TestStand you are
using. The only thing that should change is the version
number. Have a good one!
Message Edited by Patrick P. on 03-31-2006 02:59 PM
Pat P.
Software Engineer
National Instruments

How do i turn off the startup sound on macbook pro?

how do i turn off the startup sound on macbook pro?

You don't. You may find some third-party software that will, however. Try Auto Mute.
Alternatively, you can try this:
I think this is the best and simplest solution. Open a Terminal window and type (or copy/paste) the following to turn down the startup noise:
sudo nvram SystemAudioVolume="%00"
Press RETURN.
And to restore it to the original value type:
sudo nvram -d SystemAudioVolume
Press RETURN.
That's all folks.

Remove files from your startup disk

I'm trying to transfer all of my existing CD's onto my iTunes. I've transfered about 4500 songs so far (18.53 GB) and now when I try to import more, I get an error message that says "the disk I am trying to dowload to is full, please remove some files from your startup disk or empty trash."
I've emptied my trash, but still get the message. Is it just because I had downloaded too many songs/videos? Is there anything I can remove besides the songs?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You can safely delete items you don't use from the /Library/Printers/ and /Library/Packages/ folders, and more space can be freed by running Monolingual to delete foreign languages. Deleting architectures with Monolingual shouldn't be done on an Intel Mac unless you know exactly what you're doing.
(22819)

How do i clear space on my startup disk

I am frequently getting error messages that my startup disk is full - how do I clear space so my system can run better?

A good tool to help with cleaning up a disk is OmniDiskweeper. It will tell you the files and folders that are taking up the most space.
The best candidate to pick are you own files generally located in Home.
Be very careful with system files because moving or deleting them can cause your system to stop running, If in doubt ask here about the files.
Allan

HT3680 how do i clear space on my startup disk?

I've erased tons of pictures and programs from my mac and when i go to software update it still keeps telling me i can't update because my startup disk is full

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. However, the best alternative is to put in a larger hard drive.
Note that dragging files to the Trash does not remove them. You then have to Empty the Trash to free up the space.

How to recover files off unmountable seagate external drive

I have been using a Seagate Backup Plus external drive for several months on my iMac destop. The external drive runs off of USB no other power source. I unmounted it the other day to use on my mac power pc and transferred mp4 files onto drive without problems. Unmounted drive and plugged it back to iMac and I am getting prompt The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer choices of initialize, ignore, eject buttons. I have shut down and plugged it back in and reset the PRAM. I can see the unmounted device in disk utility and also I can see that it's plugged into the USB port. I have tried plugging the device into the mac power pc, macbook and pc all but pc give me the same response. On the PC I can't see the drive at all, though it has power and can be ejected. I would like to find out how to mount this drive to retrieve the files off of it. I am also wondering what to do with this drive, ie.e reformat it (if and when I retrieve files) or try to return it (bought it in Sept. 2012). Any help on this subject is greatly appreciated!

I did try Disk Utility Repair disk command, but when I ran it this is the report I received:
2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Verify and Repair volume “disk1s3”
2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Starting repair tool:
2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Checking file system2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Invalid node structure
2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Invalid B-tree node size
2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Invalid node structure
2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Invalid B-tree node size
2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: The volume could not be verified completely.
2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Volume repair complete.
2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.2013-03-07 17:02:52 -0500: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
Disk Utility stopped repairing “disk1s3”: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
I was trying to recover data without purchasing software if at all possible.

How to delete files off of my hard drive if my computer won't boot up.

So, my hard drive is filled to capacity on my macbook air and the computer flashes a Message stating "Your startup disk is full." and from there it can't even finish booting up. Is there a way to delete files off the hard drive by using an external startup drive? Terminal? I have an external WD Passport hard drive that I've partitioned with one partition being a startup disk of with OS X 10.6.8. At this point the people at the store I bought it are only offering to wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. I'd hate to lose all my pics and movies. Any suggestions?

If you have another Mac, you can plug it into your Mac, boot from that and try to access your internal hard drive from there and start dragging things off/emptying the trash. That is the only thing I can think of. If that does not work, you will have to erase.
Once you get this taken care of, remember: you should never fill your hard drive completely; the OS needs room to function properly and that would be an absolute minimum of 10 - 15 GB (more is much better) and, you should always have a current backup of everything. So, buy an external hard drive so you can make a backup as soon as you get the OS reinstalled.

Runaway cups tmp files causing full startup disk

Hi there,
Summary of my question: How do I prevent /private/var/spool/cups/tmp from filling up my wife's hard drive?
Details:
My wife's 12-inch PowerBook G4 (10.4.8) was giving her "startup disk is almost full" errors, and I found out (using this handy tip) that the culprit was the /private/var/spool/cups/tmp directory: there were 20 or 30 GB of files in there. I don't know what they're for, although based on this post I guess they might have been job history files. So I deleted them (from the terminal, using sudo), and updated the cupsd.conf file as suggested in the post. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if that actually fixed things, or if I'll need to go back and delete these files again sometime.
So my question is this: how do I prevent these files from being generated? This post says not to run server admin 24/7, but my wife's not running it at all (at least not to our knowledge), much less 24/7.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
--GP

Never mind--discovered a phantom printer job (said it was still printing, but also said "The process 'hppostprocessing' terminated unexpectedly on signal 10") that presumably was causing all the grief.

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 do i delete items from startup disk

how do i delete items from startup disk

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.
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 do I remove items from startup disk to load OS X Mavericks?

I'm trying to load OS X Mavericks and I'm getting a message to remove items from startup disk. Can anyone tell me how to do that??

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.

What directory/area is needed to delete files when your startup disk is warning it's getting full?

Have the message that the startup disk is near full and I need to delete files. What area or directory will directly clear this issue. I have cleared out trash and deleted files....is there a specific directory that causes this issue. thanks much

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.

How to clear files off my startup disk?

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