How to free up storage on macbook air?

My old mac recently crashed and in order for me not to lose all of my data I had to have my old hard drive completely transfered to my new Macbookair. What I didn't know was that I had only 4 GB of memory and that my hard drive was almost completely full after everything was transfered. I can't even backup my iphone/update the software because my computer does not have enough space.
I want to uninstall programs that are of no use to me but I am afraid to uninstall the wrong ones. Is there a way for me to see what I am using and what I am not?

May I suggest you perform some "disk forensics" first. You may want to see if there is information (data), or Local Backups taking up space that you can delete or transfer to an external disk for archiving.
First, take a look at "about this mac", and click "more info" and look under rhe "storage" tab, to see if Local Backups are consuming space. If you have Time Machine enabled, and it's been a while suince you have synced, the space taken up can be considerable. Just turn off Time Machine for a day or so, or perform a sync to rid the computer these files.
Also take a look at an app like Grand Perspective. It will let you identify the space hogs. You can then decide if the data files in your documents folder are worth of sidelining to an external disk.

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    See here for answer about the OTHER which is taking up space:
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    and here:
    http://pondini.org/OSX/DiskSpace.html
    See Kappys excellent note on the rest of “other” files taking up your space:
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    In the case of a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro Retina with ‘limited’ storage on the SSD, this distinction becomes more important in that in an ever rapidly increasing file-size world, you keep vital large media files, pics, video, PDF collections, music off your SSD and archived on external storage, for sake of the necessary room for your system to have free space to operate, store future applications and general workspace.  You should never be put in the position of considering “deleting things” on your macbook SSD in order to ‘make space’.
    Professionals who create and import very large amounts of data have almost no change in the available space on their computers internal HD because they are constantly archiving data to arrays of external or networked HD.
    Or in the case of the consumer this means you keep folders for large imported or created data and you ritually offload and archive this data for safekeeping, not only to safeguard the data in case your macbook has a HD crash, or gets stolen, but importantly in keeping the ‘breathing room’ open for your computer to operate, expand, create files, add applications, for your APPS to create temp files, and for general operation.

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    Hope this helps.
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        Empty Trash. Restart.
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        http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5836
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        http://pondini.org/OSX/DiskSpace.html
        http://pondini.org/OSX/LionStorage.html
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  • How do i clean up my macbook air to install software updates?

    how do i clean up my macbook air to install software updates? It says that I need to clean up the startup disk because I do not have enough space left but I don't know how to do that. Can anyone help me?

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    Back up all data now.
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