Comments on: 5 Quick Tips to Free Up Disk Space in Mac OS X

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 07:32:10 +0000

You can’t. When you trash a file, the file actually moved to an invisible folder on the same drive.

From the Finder, they appear to all be in one big trash can, but in reality, the trashed files are actually located in an invisible folder on each drive–the one the file was on before you trashed it.

Emptying the the trash then deletes all files from all drives.

You can prove this to yourself by creating a large file on your HHD (say 10 GB). Then trash it. If the Mac had to move the file to your SSD, this operation would take some time to transfer to the other drive. Try it and you’ll see it’s instant. Because all the Mac is doing is moving the file on your HHD into an invisible trash folder on the same drive. That’s why it’s nearly instant.

Also, notice that if you trash a file on removable drive (like a USB thumb drive) on one Mac, then eject the drive without emptying the trash, you can move the drive to another Mac, plug it in, and the trashed file will appear in the new Mac’s trash folder.

Hope this helps.

By: johan

johan — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 20:56:21 +0000

Hi Mark
Could you please help me with where I can find the iPhoto trash. Is this trash separate from the overall trash folder?Thanks

By: Loudshirtwolly

Loudshirtwolly — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 07:15:09 +0000

Delete old IOS device backups. Can be done from iTunes preferences-Devices. Scored 30+GB of SSD space with this one. Also in iPhoto create a smart folder for all files with .mov file type then drag to external disc or, better still, to network attached storage. Then delete them from iPhoto. Another 30GB saved there. The iTunes media folder can also be relocated to the NAS as well.

By: diselsamm

diselsamm — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 10:20:41 +0000

Brian, great tip!

By: Henry Larsen

Henry Larsen — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 06:13:11 +0000

This is kind of tangential but I had to laugh (and very much liked!) when I saw your ‘reboot once a month’ comment. I myself have long been in the ‘leave it on’ camp — but how do you persuade those who say ‘Save a tree, man. I love the Earth. If I won’t be using my computer for five minutes or more, I turn it off.’? I have had only limited success explaining thermodynamics to these people.

By: MikeG

MikeG — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 18:48:05 +0000

Along the line of emptying Trash, don’t forget the Apple Mail Trash. It too can build up…:-)

By: Dominic

Dominic — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 13:50:53 +0000

If you use two disks – one SSD and one HDD – your trash will most likely be located on your SSD because it’s located on the system drive. My trash is usually quite large (10, 20, 30+ GB) which is quite a decent amount compared to the SSD size (128 GB).
So I wanted to move the trash folder, which is located in /.Trashes/, to the HDD.
I suppose you might get problems if you just drag this hidden system folder…
Does anyone know how to do this safely?

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 09:29:03 +0000

Use XSlimmer to get rid of unnecessary app architectures and languages. I reclaimed about 10GB the first time I used it. It makes Time Machine quicker too!

By: Wladyslaw

Wladyslaw — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 08:47:36 +0000

Use „Clusters” by Latenitesoft . It uses Apple’s own file compression technology, transparently, completely in the background, takes little system resources, regains Gbytes of space.

By: mybatteryishot

mybatteryishot — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 07:34:37 +0000

Two suggestions especially if you don’t know why your hard drive is filling up

1. Check the size of your recovered mailboxes by going to ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/ AOL and GMail accounts are susceptible to storing messages over and over again if they are unsuccessful in sending. There are some tips on the web to stopping this issue including deleting the recovered mail folder in the mail app.

2. Check out Disk Inventory X to see a graphical representation of what’s on your hard drive. It takes about 5 minutes to scan the drive, but it is well worth it. This is a great place to start looking for massive files.

Cheers!

By: Mark Miller

Mark Miller — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 06:45:51 +0000

Another tip is to empty the iPhoto trash. When you delete a picture in iPhoto, it doesn’t actually delete it, but moves it to the iPhoto trash until you empty the iPhoto trash. You can easily have multiple gigs of photos in there, especially if you go through lots of video.

By: Alejandro Iván

Alejandro Iván — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 01:19:10 +0000

Don’t know if it’s the same than OmniSweeper or things like that, but I use CCleaner from the AppStore to clean caches and stuff… it worked great so far (specially when Safari stops loading websites because of the disk cache and there’s no other way to load the site correctly).

By: Mark Denovich

Mark Denovich — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:46:53 +0000

GrandPerspective: free app, gives a graphical representation of files, bigger files are physically bigger on the map. Makes it easy to track down large files that might be hogging disk space.

By: Patrick McMahon

Patrick McMahon — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 23:51:35 +0000

Don’t forget Monolingual, on a fresh install I have found it can easily clear up 2-3 GB of space.

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 23:18:08 +0000

I found that even when using apps like App Delete it still does’nt get rid of everything, so what I have been doing is after the app is suppose to be deleted, I use Find Any File to look for remnants of the app id places where App Delete does’nt look.