MacBook 80gig and Leopard takes most of it!

AlanD

Hi,

I have a new MacBook with an 80 gig HDD. Problem is I brought my music pictures and movies across from my old PC and now the drive is full. On further inspection, Leopard seemed to take up most of the space. What good is an 80 gig drive if Leopard takes up most of it.

I have an external 500 gig drive which I have to use now for both non-essential files and time machine backups, understanding that this is a risk.

Is there any way to pair down how much disk space Leopard uses?

Thanks.

K.O.Kiki

You can pare down the filespace by downloading & running Monolingual -- remove all languages EXCEPT English, and if you want, all architectures other than the Intel ones. That should save you a few gigs to start.

Next thing to do is download & run WhatSize -- it helps you see exactly WHERE all the space is going.

AlanD

great stuff. I'll give that a go.

Thanks!

440Hz

+1 for WhatSize, invaluable app.

Linkage

Hotblack Desiato

AlanD wrote: »

On further inspection, Leopard seemed to take up most of the space. What good is an 80 gig drive if Leopard takes up most of it.

I'm surprised at that. My Tiger partition is 80gig and I haven't deleted any applications or languages, etc.
/Applications is 4.5G
/Library 9.4G
/private 1.1G
/System 2.0G

Total 17.0 gig

There's a few other tens/hundreds of MB of OS stuff elsewhere, but that's pretty much it.

17 gigs for a full OS and applications is tiny by M$ standards, but the same stuff (with a lot more software installed) on my Linux partition only takes up 3.9 gigs...

Hotblack Desiato

If you copy music into, say, your Music folder in your home folder (say /Users/AlanD/Music) and then import it into iTunes, you will end up with a copy of all the music in the iTunes folder (by default this is /Users/AlanD/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music ) so you will have twice the space taken up by that music. You can leave the files in the iTunes folder alone and delete the duplicates in your home or Music folder.

Edit: Normal caveats apply (i.e. take a backup first, check there are in fact two copies of anything you plan to delete, and check you are deleting the correct one.)

It's possible that iPhoto also makes duplicates of stuff imported into it, I don't know, I don't use it. Worth checking.

abakan

ye iPhoto duplicates aswell

its keeps the original and if you modify the photo, it creates a new modified photo
takes up alot of space for me

im installing leopard aswell and im having to back up all my music and photos to upgrade tiger

it a pain but its a bit of house cleaning!!!

AlanD

I must look in to this and see what space I can save by deleting the originals....well, once I have kept a backup.

Just say in iTunes or iPhoto, if I now download a song or import new pics from a camera, will they be created in two places or just the main repository?

Ste.phen

If you download from the iTunes store, or import from the camera, you'll have just one copy, inside the iTunes or iPhoto directory.
The duplication happens if you copy them first to a folder in your mac somewhere, and then import them to iTunes.

This drove me nuts when i first got my mac as i used to keep all my music organised myself. But then i realised that I dodn't care that much, as long as the search button in iTunes worked correctly (which it does)

ZENER

You could of course disable :

Keep iTunes Music folder organised.

and

Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library.

Much handier if, like me, you store your music on an external drive or server.

Also easier to backup as well as the only files you'll need to save are:

MacHD/Users/<username>/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library

&
MacHD/Users/<username>/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml.

This preserves all the links and playlists for you when you reinstall.

ZEN

abakan

With the duplicate photo, I copied them directly from my camera into iphoto and modified them and it duplicated the photo i edited.

ZENER

iPhoto seems to make 3 "copies" of a photo. It creates a thumbnail image that you see in it's window, the originals is saved away and never touched and the edited image is saved to your event or library.

ZEN

atilladehun

I just got a refurb 80GB and had been looking around here for optimising and app tips. I ran monolingual and it took just over 4 GB off my harddrive. I don't have any other apps than firefox downloaded and no media either.

However the laptop came with 10.4.10 loaded on and a disc for Leopard, this just added on 5.5 GB ontop of the previous OS. Is this correct or can I get something to remove whatever of the old OS?

By the way,

Thanks for your help guys the useful app lists and noob questions are invaluable, sortin me out here.