I just saw an ad a couple days ago for a 1.5 terabyte drive for $115, which works out to over eight gigabytes per dollar (approximately the amount of storage you get in a free Google Mail account). I paid about $170 for a drive half that size two Black Fridays ago. Twenty years ago, it was inconceivable that ordinary people would have access to anything resembling a gigabyte of hard disk storage.

For many of us, though, our digital data (primarily text documents, images, audio, and video) has ballooned to fill up the hard drives in our computers, requiring the purchase of extra drives for storage and backup. If you find your Mac is starting to get dramatically sluggish and even giving you dire warnings about low disk space, it's time to do some spring cleaning.

You can start by archiving data (e.g., burning it to a CD or DVD), moving data to another storage device, or simply deleting it if you truly don't need it any more. These operations, especially when they involve many gigabytes of data, can take time to do and may sometimes require making difficult decisions, so if you need to defer them, here are some suggestions for freeing up space posthaste.

I would start by downloading and running a utility like the shareware Cocktail (run its default "Pilot" script) or freeware Onyx (execute the default "Automation" script) to clean your system caches and reboot. This will often free up several hundred megabytes or more of space and is the equivalent of a tune-up or oil change. I do this myself about once a month or so.

Several other utilities that can help with removing unnecessary files:

Monolingual [freeware] deletes unused foreign language resources (but doesn't affect display of foreign scripts). Depending on the software you have installed, it will save you several hundred megabytes up to several gigabytes. YMMV.

Grand Perspective [freeware] lets you see visually which folders/files take up the most space. This one should be used with caution, or not at all. Similar utilities which present size data in different ways include WhatSize [shareware] and the recently emancipated OmniDiskSweeper.

For finding and processing duplicates of all kinds, I've found nothing better than Tidy Up! (currently $30 for the just-released version 2), but you will probably need to read the manual since what it is doing is not trivial. If you only need iTunes duplicates processing, check out the $15 utility Dupin.

In any case, don't wait too long to address the primary causes of your low drive space syndrome!

Technorati Tags:
Apple, Mac, Tips, Storage