[ghporter]

I had an external drive give me some problems, so I moved what was on it onto my iMac temporarily while I fixed the drive. After moving the stuff back (after doing some comparisons and weeding out some unneeded stuff), I find that I have about 50GB less space than I started with. I have to scour what I have in the folders I was messing with on the iMac, but what sorts of hidden backups, logs and etc. are safe for me to delete so that I can clean up my computer?

[turtle777]

Uhm, I know, stupid question, but did you empty the trash ?

Also, a reboot will release some of space used up by the temp files.

I guess comparing before and after might be a bit misleading since you probably didn't compare a newly booted up system in both cases.

-t

[ghporter]

I emptied the trash and the found something more to delete, so I used Secure Empty that time. I still have about 45GB tied up somewhere. And I had only a basic, ballpark number for how much disc space I had before I started because I wanted to make sure I had enough space to back up the important stuff on the external drive. Maybe I should have written down the numbers, but I didn't think of that. I will reboot this afternoon or tonight and see what my available space looks like then.

[turtle777]

To be honest, 50GB sounds too much for just some log and scratch files.

I use OmniDiskSweeper to find out what uses up my HD space.

-t

[ghporter]

I agree that there's something I have somehow forgotten went on the external, or otherwise have misplaced that's taking up most of this space, but I don't know where it is, so I don't know where to look. I'll try OmniDiskSweeper and see what it comes up with. Thanks for the pointer.

[angelmb]

DaisyDisk is another cute, rather expensive, option to consider.

[ghporter]

Well OmniDiskSweeper was very helpful. It pointed out about 40GB of video work files (movie events) that were left behind and no longer needed, so I got rid of those. I must have forgotten about how much space I'd used when I put those videos together, so when I backed them up at the end of the project, they took up plenty of space. They're gone now!

Omni also sort of reminded me that I have a lot of "stuff" in my Documents folder that I haven't really paid enough attention to, so I have a bit of a "housecleaning" project to clean that up. But overall I think I'm in much better shape space wise than before using OmniDiskSweeper. Thanks for that, turtle!

[JKT]

Btw, if you want ODS to scan all files on your drive, including those of other accounts run the following command in Terminal:

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

This assumes you have installed it in the /Applications folder. Edit the path if you haven't!

N.B. Usual caveats apply - this makes the software run with admin permissions so take care with what you choose to delete.

N.B. Part 2: If you don't run as an admin account, before running the command above first switch to an admin user prompt in Terminal by typing:

su <admin user name here>

(sans the < and >).

Then enter the password for the admin account.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by JKT 

Btw, if you want ODS to scan all files on your drive, including those of other accounts run the following command in Terminal...

Good to know. I only have the one account on this machine, so it's the only one that generates data (and uses up disk space). But if I had more, I'd certainly want to clean the others out too.

[iChris]

Never used ODS, going to check it out. I have used DiskInventoryX for checking out whats taking up space. It has a cool visual display of all the data.

[turtle777]

DiskInventoryX looks good, I shall give it a try.

-t

[patrix]

Originally Posted by JKT 

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

quick tip: you can use the open command so you don't have to guess/navigate the whole hierarchy of the .app..

sudo open /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app

done!


Patrix.