Need to free up space on hard drive
I have been trying to free up some space on my hard drive have removed all photos and a lot of music and some programs not using still not seeing much gain in storage space what can I do to clean up some space
teamfollis:
Dr. Smoke's FAQ linked by eww has a comprehensive list of things you can do to clean up your HDD. This should give you breathing space. However, your HDD remains the same, and the freed space will soon fill up again. Besides, if you have the original HDD in the computer, it likely near the end of its useful life.
Here are some other ideas:
• Get an external firewire HDD and put iTunes Music folder and iPhoto Library on it.
• Use your external HDD as your boot drive.
• Install a new larger capacity HDD. The original HDD in your computer is likely within the 3 to 5 years that these drives last on average. You can purchase and install a larger and faster HDD that will keep everything in one place, and will give you the 15% to 20% contiguous free space the HDD needs for efficient functioning.
Please do post back with further questions or comments.
cornelius
Message was edited by: cornelius
Similar Messages
-
Hi- I'm using 10.4.8 on my new MacBook and was wondering if anyone could tell me if they know what I can free up on the Hard drive to create more disk space? It seems to me that there are quite a few printer files and languages and probably a few other that I'm not sure if I need-
Can anyone help?
Thanks in advance,
macbook Mac OS X (10.4.8)When I received my BlackBook, the first thing I did was doa clean install of the OS so I could leave all the stuff off that I knew I would ever use. I assume that you do not want to do that now, so you can use a program called Monolingual to remove the languages. You can simple delete the printer drivers that you will not need also.
Go through the "Applications" folder and you will surely find things that you do not need. I took of the Office Test Drive, Quicken, the games, and quite a few others. Garage Band and the sample loops were a huge disk hog, so out they went. -
So I am really stressed out right now.
I have a macbook pro, with a 750 gb hard drive in it. My internal hard drive filled up a while back so I bought a 3TB external hard drive. I backed up my files onto my external a while ago, but I don't really remember how... There is a folder on my hard drive that is called " wd smartware.swstor" , and inside that folder is about 1.7 TB of files (when I click 'get info')... So I'm guessing that is where all my stuff is being backed up. But I also moved files from my computer onto that hard drive, like pictures and videos, that I wanted to delete off my internal... So I may have duplicates?
But my 3TB hard drive is almost full, it has 400GB free on it. And my 750gb internal hard drive on my macbook pro, has filled up again so it only has 10gb free space. So basically I have almost 3TB of files on my external hard drive, and 740gb on my internal.. This can't be right. There is no way I have this many files. I am guessing I have some of the same files on my internal that I do on my external.. Most of my files are high quality HD video files that I imported through final cut pro x....
So I bought another 3TB external hard drive that I haven't used yet. Basically, I just want to move all my files that are on my internal hard drive (roughly 750gb) onto my NEW external 3TB hard drive- and then delete the files off my internal so I have more free space. I just don't know if these files are already being backed up on my OLD external 3TB hard drive.
Can someone please help? Thank you!craigbuckley wrote:
If I get rid of my TIme Machine, will I lose all my files from the past?
Yes it will unless you back it up first out of TM.
TimeMachine is a self rotating image of your boot drive with saved states, it manages itself based upon the available space on the drive. As new states are created, old ones are deleted along with older versions of your files.
Also if you incur a drastic large change to your boot drive, TimeMachine will DELETE older versions of your files.
TimeMachine is not a archival solution!
To rescue yourself from TimeMachine, you will first need to save the recent copy of file(s) to the new 3TB, then restore the older version of the file from TimeMachine to the boot drive and then rename it/date it and save that older copy to the new 3TB drive.
This way you have both the new copy and the old copy of the file pernamently archived on the new 3TB drive.
Once you have exhausted all of TimeMachines older files, you can free yourself from it, erase the drive.
For your needs, I suggest this.
Internal drive and bootable clone
1: Your internal 750GB boot drive contains active working files.
2: You have another external drive that's either 750GB or 1TB, you use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of your boot drive, update it when you know you have a stable OS X system on your boot drive and before updates or changes, this way if the update goes bad and the machine will not boot. You can connect the clone, hold the option key down and boot the comptuer from the clone. You then can get online to get help, or simply reverse clone your software problems away.
CCC has the ability like TimeMachine to save states between clones, it's on be default but you can turn this off as to maintain a pure clone, this is what I advise you do as to avoid confusion. You clone is a perfect copy since the last update of the clone, which you can setup to do nightly if you wish or every few days or every few weeks, whatever.
Your bootable clone is your lifesaver if your boot hard drive dies or refuses to boot up, you can boot from the clone in seconds and only be slightly off since the last update of the clone. TM won't run the computer like a clone will.
I highly adise keeping your clone in a very safe place, away from theft, fire, electrical, etc.
http://www.bombich.com/
External Storage Drives
3: Your first external 3TB drive (sans TimeMachine) will be your storage drive, this will contain any files that you don't wish to have on the internal drive and as a result also not on the clone.
You maintain folders that are dated, with older copies of files in those folders if you wish. This way you can control the space on the drive and not make multiple duplicates of all the large files like TM does.
For instance if you work on a 100GB project for three days, instead of having three copies taking up 300GB like what TM does, you can rather choose to have just one older copy at 100GB. You can decide you don't need a particular older version of a file and remove it, thus managing your drive space yourself.
4: Your other external 3TB is a Carbon Copy Cloner backup of the first 3TB, maintain a perfect clone of that as well and update it periodically as your needs change. Since CCC can be schedualed and works in the background, you can have it update your clones overnight or another time your not using the machine. This free's up performance as TM isn't running in the background while your trying to work.
Also with no TM local cache file, that also will free up space on the boot drive.
The general rule is you need both hardware AND software protection for your data, thus with too much data to fit on the boot drive, you need a external storage drive and then a backup of that as to maintain TWO hardware copies of your data at all times.
This method is also scaleable, if you need more room than 3TB externally, you then get another 2 3TB drives, one for the new data and one for backup.
The bootable clone of your bootdrive is kept in a very safe place, it's designed to protect your OS X investment in software etc. and espectially, to get your Mac booting in as short as a time as possible while you plan on a replacement boot hard drive/repair.
Read more about the advanced options bootable clones give here.
Most commonly used backup methods
With your large storage needs, you basically have outgrown TimeMachine by hitting the hardware limit of drives.
If there were 10-20TB drives, you likely could keep on going with TimeMachine, but you can't.
Your clearly in the more "professional" catagory with your storage management needs, not in the TM "newbie to computers" where it's managed for you.
If your finding your needs are going to exceed 6TB, you might want to consider a external hardware RAID 5 box with 5+ drives, they will self redundancy so if a drive dies you just switch it with a new one and the missing data is copied from the other drives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
http://www.macgurus.com/
Good Luck -
Moving photos and movies to free up space on hard drive
My MacBook hard drive is almost full. The majority of the space is taken up by photos and movies. I would like to move my current collection of photos and movies to an external hardrive, and then delete the files off my harddrive so that I have the space available to add more photos. However, I still want to easily access the old photos on the external harddrive and the new photos thta will be put on the hard drive. Any suggestions and the best way to accomplish this?
Easiest way to do this would be to copy your iTunes folder (located inside your home folder/Music) to your external hard drive. Next, open iTunes while holding down the option key on your keyboard. When iTunes asks you to select a music library to use, select the one on the external hard drive. Test to make sure everything is working just as it did with your old library. Assuming it does, you can now delete the iTunes folder on your internal hard drive.
The same process can be used with iPhoto.
Best of luck. -
I use an external hard drive for my Lightroom library and I notice that all the images shown on there are DNG. On my MAC hard drive I have images shown as NEF. I desperately need to free up space on my hard drive, can I safely delete these NEFs?
dj_paige wrote:
however, I do point out that obtaining an additional hard drive and not throwing anything away seems a preferable solution to me.
heidie22, dj_paige has a very good point there. I would not through away the NEF files; I would archive them to a external drive.
By the way, I am assuming that converting RAW files to DNG is a decision you have made and not an accident. -
I need to move an iTunes library to an External Hard Drive to free up space on iMac. I Need suggestions on type of External Hard Drive to use. Should you use a Multimedia Hard Drive like LaCie LaCinema Classic HD Multimedia Hard Drive OR a standard Large Desktop Hard Drive like Western Digital/Seagate/LaCie?
There is no benefit to the multi-media feature on the first drive you mentioned. If you are going to look at differences between certain drives, I'd look at the differences in reliability first.
-
I'm trying to transfer my pictures from my iPhoto library to my external hard drive. I dragged the iPhoto Library folder into the drive and after waiting a while it says "Error Code -36 The finder cannot complete the operation because some data in 'iPhoto Library' could not be read or written". I need to free up space asap, what should i do??
Yes, the Old Master file has a folder for each year where I find all photos from that specific year. I am attaching a screen shot of the file.
In the meantime i have managed to download all photos (it did not download any video files though in mpg, avi, 3gp, m4v,mp4 and mov format) to a new iphoto library. Unfortunately the photos are quite mixed and often doubled up. I ma considering to purchase iphoto library which checks all duplicates in iphoto. this will save me a lot of time. What do you think? -
How do I move iTunes completely off my computer and onto my external hard drive? I have no more space on my computer and need to free up space quickly! will iTunes work from external hard drive only? many thanks :)
With iTunes closed, copy (safer if you don't yet have a backup) or move the entire iTunes folder from <User's Music> to X:\ as X:\iTunes (where X is the drive letter of the external). Press and hold down shift as you click the icon to start iTunes, keep holding shift until asked to choose or create a library, click choose, then browse to and open X:\iTunes\iTunes Library.itl.
Note that changing the advanced preference for the media folder location doesn't change where iTunes expects to find existing content. Moving the library in the way outlined above however will work.
You should think about backing up your library to another external drive or network share.
tt2 -
I need to free up space on my hard drive. How do you move photo's to my external?
I need to free up space on my hard drive in order to complete a new update. How do I move photo's from my macbook air to my external hard drive?
You need to backup your Iphoto library to Time Machine first (if you havent already done so)
THEN you need to copy your Iphoto library to another HD before deleting from your Macbook ,....because 1 copy only is = NO COPY in case of HD failure!
To move an iPhoto liobrary -
quit iPhoto and drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity to the external drive - depress the option key and launch iPhoto using the "select library" option to point to the new location on the external drive - fully test it and then trash the old library on the internal drive (test one more time prior to emptying the trash)
And be sure that the External drive is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) (iPhoto does not work with drives with other formats) and that it is always available prior to launching iPhoto from LarryHN
As to your AIr and its SSD =
You need to change the premise of your SSD use.
see here:
Your Solid State Drive and having enough space inside your Macbook Air & Pro
Solid State Drive usage premise, or the “more space / upgrade SSD” question
There have been questions posed and positions taken by many people who are trying to use their Macbook Air or Pro’s solid state drive (SSD) as a mass media storage device, for either pictures, videos, massive music collections or all three combined; but this should not be the working premise of a ‘limited’ SSD and its use.
In which, it’s the case of those users with either 128GB, 256GB, or even 512GB of internal SSD space, that have or are running “out of space”, that questions are raised. The immediate premise of some users can sometimes be “(how to / if) upgrading my SSD” when in fact in nearly all instances another approach is the logical and sensible one that needs to be looked into and exercised.
Any Macbook containing a SSD should be idealized as a ‘working platform’ notebook containing all your applications, documents, and weekly or bi-weekly necessary files. All collections of media files such as pictures, music, and videos, unless directly needed should be kept off the notebook and on an external hard drive or likewise. While the ‘working platform’ premise is also the case with larger internal conventional hard drives of 1TB+, its implementation isn't as critical except in terms of data protection.
Realistically, you should at most coordinate roughly 20 to 25% of your total SSD space to all audio-video personal use media (picture / music / video collections), leaving the remaining amount on an external HD.
Nobody should consider any notebook a data storage device at any time under any circumstance, rather a data creation, sending, and manipulation device; and in the case of a SSD, this is more important for purposes of having sufficient working space on the SSD and reducing SSD ‘bloat’ in which cases someone is wrongly attempting to use the SSD space as a large media storage nexus.
The rare exception to the collective usage and premise of SSD use in which a much larger SSD is truly needed are for those in video and photography professions that require both the extremely fast speeds of the SSD and the onboard storage for large and or many video and photography files. However this also falls under the premise of a ‘working platform’ for such peoples rather than the intent of many who are using the SSD as passive and static data storage for media files very infrequently needed or accessed.
All on-notebook data collections should be logically approached as to necessity, and evaluated as to whether it is active or passive data that likely doesn’t need to be on the notebook, allocations of space-percentages to as-needed work and use, apportioning space for your entertainment media, and questioning whether it should it be on the notebook for more than short-term consumption.
Considerations should be made in the mind of any user in differentiating the necessary system data (System hub) comprising the Mac OSX, applications, necessary documents that both must and should be on your internal SSD, and that of the users personal data (Data hub) comprising created files, pictures, music, videos, PDF files, data created or being created and otherwise, that likely unless being used soon or often should be parked on an external hard drive for consumption, or temporarily loading onto the internal SSD.
You both can and should purchase whichever SSD size you need or see fit, but even in the case of the largest of SSD, unless use-considerations are made, and SSD spaces are allocated as should be the case indicated above, one can easily and immediately run into this quandary of “needing more internal SSD space”, in which instance a different approach in usage must then be implemented.
However it is almost always the case, that such large media files are wanted to be stored internally rather than actually needed, in which case the external HD is both prudent as well as necessary. Additionally costs per MB are infinitely less on an external HD than an internal SSD in any consideration of data expansion needs.
A Professional Example
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 also never be put in the position of considering “deleting things” on your Macbook SSD in order to ‘make space’. This is especially what your external HD is for.
Professionals who create and import very large amounts of data have almost no change in the available space on their notebooks internal SSD 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 SSD crash, or gets stolen, but importantly in keeping the ‘breathing room’ open for your notebook to operate, expand, create files, add applications, for your APPS to create temp files, and for general operation.
Slim USB3 1TB external hard drive
External Hard Drives
External hard drives are both extremely cheap and regardless of the size of your internal SSD (or even internal hard drive if the case), you need an external hard drive with your SSD equipped Macbook for several reasons:
1. Data backup and protection.
2. Redundancy for important data.
3. Necessitated ideal space for large media files for collections of pictures, videos, and music etc.
While ever changing in price, typical portable 2.5” external hard drives in USB3 run roughly $65 for 1TB or $120 for 2TB small portable USB3 hard drives. Such drives range in thickness between 5mm and 15mm, with recent improvements in storage of 500GB drives in 5mm profiles.
There is almost no premise in which a small 12mm thick 1 Terabyte USB hard drive cannot be taken along with any Macbook as an external large storage extension inside any Macbook carry case or pouch. Typically such external HD profiles are not much bigger than a deck of cards.
External hard drives are a foregone necessity for purchase with any Macbook for at the very least Time Machine backups, data redundancies, and ideally for large media storage. -
whats the best way to transfer all my pic and vid files from Mac Air to back up drive to free up space on hard disk?
Get a third drive if needed, open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences, set it not to exclude that drive, and drag the files to it. If you're moving an iTunes or iPhoto library, launch the application with the Option key held down and choose the moved library.
(118789) -
How do I get Finder windows to display free space on hard drive?
In Snow Leopard if you opened a Finder window, at the bottom it would show how much free space your hard drive had left. Lion by default does not do this. Is there a way where I can turn that option on so i can view space availible when opening Finder windows?
Stop blaming yourself. You're not an idiot and it's never the user's fault. It's always the designer's fault. Read "The Design of Everyday Things' by Donald Norman. It's a gerat book about how everyday things can be just difficult to use. He's been also a former Apple employee. Great reading!
-
After clicking "Download," the iMac seems to download photos from iPhone. Eventually, I get message that I need to free up space on Startup Disc by deleting files. What to do?
You are in a very dangerous situation and you need to fix it now.
OS X needs about 10 gigs of hard drive space for normal OS operations - things like virtual memory, temporary files and so on.
Without this space your Mac will slow down as the OS hunts for space on the disk, files will be fragmented, also slowing things down, apps will crash and the risk of data corruption - that is damage to your files, photos, music - increases exponentially.
Your first priority is to make more space on that HD. Nothing else can be done until you do.
Purchase an external HD and move your Photos and Music to it. Both iPhoto and iTunes can run perfectly well with the Library on an external disk. -
How do I move my iTunes movies to my iCloud? I need to free up space
I need to free up space on my MacBoo hard drive and thought a good place to start would be moving my movie library to the iCloud. How do I make that transfer?
Probably the easiest way is to drag the files from the iTunes window to the external drive. Make sure they have copied. Delete them from iTunes. Hold down the option key and drag the copied files back to iTunes. This will add them back but mapped to their new location and the option/alt key will stop the files from being copied to your Media folder on the internal drive.
In future if you are adding a batch of files in one go you can set preferences temporarily to store media on the external drive, then change back again. See also: iTunes 12 for Mac: Change where your iTunes files are stored - http://support.apple.com/kb/PH19507 -
Hi,
I was wondering if someone can help me. I have a MacBook Pro, it has came up saying I need to free up space on the disk as it full every time it starts up, so I log in and no icons or applications show up on the screen just my background wallpaper, the only thing I can do is the force quit keyboard shortcut but there is nothing to quit, I have tried to start up in safe mode but again there is no icons in the desktop,
I have my disks that came with my laptop I have went into disk utility to repair disk and I still seem to have the same problem .. No icons or apps or anything lol just the cursor I can only shut down the laptop via power but and the press shut down.
Please help I am going out my mind with this thing :(
Thanks x jadeThis can be used to boot the machine and delelte enough files to get it to boot normally.
.Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive
Read about storage drive so you can store your extra stuff.
Most commonly used backup methods
Also here to see how a full boot drive slows the machine down
Why is my computer slow? -
My MacBook Pro hard drive is almost full and I wish to store my Aperture Library on an external drive, how do I do this and is the use of USB2 suitable or do I need to use a Firewire external hard drive?
You'll get better performance if you use a Firewire hard drive (especially if you buy a 7200 RPM drive). Firewire's IO speed is significantly faster than USB 2. USB 2 has a theoretical max speed of 480 Mbps except that it has extremely high over-head. The fastest speeds you can typically get are about 300 Mbps. Firewire, on the other hand, has very little overhead. The fastest speeds you can get are very nearly 800 Mbps. You will typically be constrained by the maximum read/write speed of the drive, not the speed of the I/O on the Firewire bus. Now if you had one of those nice shiny new Macs with the Thunderbolt I/O and a Thunderbolt drive (Light Peak) ... I think they alter space and time so that your data arrives before you know you want it.
Also... unless you want to buy a solid state drive (very expensive), try to keep your hard drives from becoming much more than about 60% full if you want great performance. A nearly "full" hard drive is, on average, only about half as fast as the same hard drive when nearly empty.
USB 2 will work perfectly fine... just not as fast.
Also... it's much safer to move the entire Aperture library than to "relocate masters". Your images must be managed. You can Aperture manage them, or you can manage them. But someone has to manage them. If you "relocate" them so that they are no longer stored inside the Aperture library then you'll need to work out a system of how you decide to organize things and it's critically important that you don't start moving files around or deleting things without Aperture's knowledge. If you do, you'll break the links to your masters and start having problems with missing masters. If you have Aperture manage the library then you don't need to worry about any of that stuff.... it's safer.
Do make backups (use the Aperture Vault or use some other backup program, but make sure you back up your work if you care about it.) There are only two kinds of hard drives in the world: (1) those that have failed and (2) those that are going to fail. There are no exceptions to this rule. Hard drives are cheap. Backup software is built into Aperture and into your Mac.
Maybe you are looking for
-
Why do i have to init a VARCHAR for a SELECT in a Pro*C PL/SQL block?
Hi, i use PL/SQL Block in a Embedded C Programm and compile with the PRO*C Compiler. Oracle 10gR2. When i Select .. Into a VARCHAR bind variable, i have to initialize the variable before, otherwise i get an ORA-1458. Same problem with assignments to
-
Launching a MIDlet from another
Hi All! I need to create a menu.When one selects a particular option they should be redirected to another midlet .Need basics of creating forms . Desperately need for a project whose deadline is on our head . How do i go abt this ? Thanks .
-
My husband has a 3000 n200 laptop which always starts up in lenovo care before Windows boots up. is there any way we can stop it doing this? jiffyrat
-
Tring to update from Itunes iphone 4 and not seeing anything resembling the above. Only references to iphone 4s or 5..Don't see the summary pane at all...Help
-
Configuring Cisco Aironet 1140 for Radius and setting up a Radius server
guys i need some help setting up my Radius to work with cisco aironet 1140, i am new at this however i was tasked with setting up a Radius server and setting our AP with WPA2- enterprise so users can log into our AP using AD credentials. When i try t