Freeing up disk space on Mac OS X

Space was a little tight (5GB) after my upgrade to Leopard and so I went on the hunt to free up space and ended up freeing almost 20GB of my 100GB disk — enough to let me set-up a new 20GB Boot Camp partition that will host Vista and take over from my XP Pro Parallels image with any luck.

Large forgotten files

Disk Inventory X helps identify large files on your system which may no longer be required. In my case 8GB of imported iMovie clips, a 4GB Parallels backup HD image and a 140MB download of Boot Camp 1.4. A few blank DVD-R’s later and I’m almost 13GB lighter.

Unnecessary languages & platforms

I had previously removed the unused foreign languages and binary support using a mix of tools that was time consuming but obviously the Leopard upgrade has replaced all that.

Monolingual can remove both languages and binaries in a single sweep although it does take a good few minutes to run. Despite electing to keep English, English (UK), French and German for now as well as keeping the Intel and Intel 64-bit binaries I managed to claw back another 1.9GB of disk space. As an example Address Book shrunk from 45MB to 9MB.

As a warning, be aware you will need to reinstall Mac OS X if you want these languages back…

Music library clean-up

Head into iTunes and create a couple of new Smart Playlists:

• Untitled and set the criteria of Play Count is 0
• Abandoned Songs and set the criteria of Last Played is not in the last 3 months

Go through these and decide if they are worth keeping or not, in my case this was another 2.5GB.

You may also want to try dragging your ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music folder to the Library in iTunes to make sure iTunes is aware of all the files. I had about 30 songs that were no longer in iTunes but still in the file-system, no doubt from previously removing them in iTunes and hitting the wrong option.

Cleaning up the logs

Okay, we’re hitting that law of diminishing returns here but head into Utilities > Console and Move to Trash many of those logs.

Empty that trash can and rejoice!

If only we had compressible file-system support like Microsoft introduced with MS-DOS 6.2… Well, thankfully it’s on the cards as it is a feature of ZFS which is only read-only in Leopard but should be read-write before 10.6. That should claw back another 5–10GB of space for developers with all those highly compressible source files on their disks.

[)amien