Is your hard drive full? Do you notice your computer slowing down? Apple recommends keeping 25% of your hard drive space free! Less than 10% free can cause your hard drive to fail. Your computer needs “room” to move things around. The closest analogy is this. If you use a closet to change clothes; it needs to be large enough to contain your body plus turn around, bend over, extend your arms and pull up your pants. So, how does one free up space on a hard drive?
Here are some tips:
- Backup, Backup, Backup! I can’t say this enough! Before you start cleaning, removing, fixing, deleting….Back up your data!
- Look at your applications and see if there are some you don’t use! If you have downloaded apps that are being used; delete them.
- AppDelete and AppZapper are two inexpensive apps that delete not only the app but all the hidden files that are placed within the operating system.
- Download Onyx, a free app, that will clean cache and other needless data.
- Consider the purchase of utilities such as Clean My Mac and MacKeeper. These are excellent utilities that remove needless files and will free up space.
- Empty your trash.
- Open iPhoto and delete photos you no longer need. iPhoto has its own application trash so remember to empty that.
- Open iTunes and delete all of the music and podcasts you no longer like or need.
- Open Documents and delete any that are no longer valuable.
- Download the application Monolingual and remove all localization files not used for your language. This can free up to 2GB of space, a significant step to freeing space.
- Delete “Zip” files you do not need.
- Delete “Dmg” files you do not need. These are Disc Image Files.
- Go to ~/Library/Caches/, and delete anything you see from applications you no longer have installed. Repeat the process in ~/Library/Preferences/.
- Consider putting images and music on an external drive.
- Look at your Downloads folder and see if you can delete any “Downloads.”
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