In my last article about saving space on your Mac titled Cleaning Up Your Mac: Detection, we covered ways to figure out how much space is taken up on your Mac. There was one app in particular that I use called Disk Inventory X that will allow you to visually see the distribution of data on your hard drive. It also has the ability to delete files from within the app which is something we will get into right now.
First and foremost, you should never delete something unless you know what it is. It is all too easy to delete a large file that is essential to your Mac rendering it inoperable. Always proceed with caution when you are attempting to free up space on any type of computer.
With that little disclaimer out of the way, I have a few ways that I like to free up space on my Mac.
Empty the Trash
The first and easiest is to simply empty the trash. You might chuckle at this one but I am notorious for dragging files to my trash can and never emptying my trash can. This is partly due to the fact that I prefer to do a Secure Empty Trash rather than your standard empty, which takes much longer. I like to use the secure method because instead of making that space available to be overwritten, it resets that memory block back to 0. Both the Secure Empty and standard Empty will free up space and give you more room on your drive but the secure way will also increase the efficiency and speed of the drive. These gains are only marginal, but I am the type of person who likes to keep my Mac in tip-top shape.
Keep iTunes Clean
Another thing that I find happens often in my iTunes library is the duplication of songs. In fact, I looked at my library last night and had some 90 duplicate songs there. Sure, some are songs with the same name on different albums, but the rest were just the same song on my hard drive twice (and even triplicate). iTunes is fairly smart when it comes to duplicate songs, which is a great advantage to us all. To display duplicate songs in iTunes 10 (that is what I am running, which is not the latest version) go to the File menu and click Display Duplicates. Doing so will change your view to list all songs that have the same name as another. As I mentioned before, this will include songs that have the same name but are on different albums so keep an eye out for that when selecting which songs to delete. The other thing to note is that it lists both the “original” and “duplicate” songs so you will need to leave one of them behind or you will delete that song entirely from your library. Don’t forget to empty your trash once you have removed the songs from iTunes.
Delete Unwanted iOS Backups
With iCloud becoming more and more usable, the need for a copy of your iOS device’s backup on your Mac is less and less important. This means that if you are using iCloud backups, you might have some old iOS backups saved on your machine. Fire up iTunes and go to Preferences in the iTunes menu. Once you have that open, go to the Devices tab. There, you should see a list of every iOS backup you have saved on your hard drive with a date and time stamp. Simply select the backup you wish to delete and click the Delete Backup… button.
Clean out the Downloads Folder
Often when browsing the web you might need to download a 3rd party plugin or you might be downloading apps from websites rather then from the app store. Well eventually your Downloads folder can get filled up with installers and other miscellaneous files that were intended to be temporary. Simply navigate to your Downloads folder and filter through it to ensure nothing needs to be kept (though nothing should need to be). Once you know what you are deleting go ahead and move the files to the trash and make sure to empty it.
These are just a few of many ways to keep your Mac’s hard drive clean. They are regular maintenance procedures I like to do for my Mac every now and again. What I suggest everyone do is stay away from programs or apps that claim to free up space (these apps will remain nameless but you know who you are). Frankly, I just don’t trust them since I don’t know exactly what the program is doing automatically. I prefer the manual control I have when I am deleting files since things can easily go south when deleting from a computer.
I hope that this two-part article will help my fellow Mac users be a little more knowledgeable when it comes to how your computer stores data and the best way to keep that data from piling up. A final word about cleaning — do it early and often and it won’t be such a pain in the butt when you do.