While
working on Mac, all of a sudden a dialog box starts appearing on your
screen: 'Your Startup Disk is full'. It's the final
confirmation of what you've been afraid off - your hard drive has
finally ran out of space and now you will have to do something to
overcome it.
The
question arises, how to make space on HD?
When you started up your shiny new
Mac for the first time, you might have thought about the hard drive
space although you were confident that it won’t ever fill it up.
But, now after few months you have filled every troy of your hard
drive capacity.
No need to panic, because here we
will discuss every feasible measure to solve this problem. This will
help you to identify the causes of rapid filling up of your hard
drive, plus discover which files causes disaster on your drive. Let’s
discuss some tips which will help you to recover some free space on
your Mac drive. Reviving a Mac hard drive is quite simple process,
but not a short one. If your hard drive space is vanishing or getting
filled rapidly, then you need to know the consequences which make
your hard drive fill up to its capacity.
How Hard drive space get
consumed.
User install a fair number of
applications on their Mac, some time just to try them but forgets to
uninstall them during their busy day schedules and thinking that hard
drive space would last forever. This thing may eat your few gigabytes
of space easily. Where as files downloaded via browser or an email
attachment pile ups on your hard drive, but yet again more Gigabytes
of the drive are gone.
Moreover, User's personal files like
photos, videos are the biggest drains on your hard drive space. Every 10 megapixel photo consumes about 4MB in JPEG format, which makes
around 400MB to 1.5GB of space for storing 100 photos on your hard
drive. The average one hour HDV video holds 13GB of data , so its
better not to keep on pilling your videos on your hard drive.
It's not over yet, iTunes library
can consume plenty of space on your hard drive with your music
collection, podcasts, movies and TV shows. You will be surprised to
know that duplicate files existing on your hard drive consumes enough
space but if it’s of small size then you need not to bother.
Activity Monitor plays vital role in
analysing the application which are consuming space on your hard
drive. Some programs automatically starts up when you log onto your
Mac. Check Login items in System Preferences so that all the listed
app are of use and needed. If not then just select it and click the
minus (-) sign.
Ways To Revive Space Back on Your
Mac Hard Drive.
Uninstall Unwanted Apps:- Like
Login items, through Application folder you can uninstall anything
which is no more useful to you. It wont fasten up your Mac but it
will reclaim your hard drive space back. You can simply uninstall
application by dragging and dropping them to trash.
Check For Some Maintenance:-
You should check whether your hard disk is fine or not. To diagnose simply run Disk Utility (in Applications > Utilities) to verify
and repair disk permissions. This helps in determining which app can
do what with files on your Mac. It also verify and repair the disk
itself.
Troubleshoot you Battery and
Memory:- If user owns a Mac notebook and having problem with the
battery. If you want to get longest life of your battery, fine-tune
it so that it gives optimal battery life out of it. If your draining
rapidly, then it's a warning. You need to reset the SMU or PMU. Some
problems are resolved by resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM.
Reclaim Your Hard drive Space
Back :- While you are cleaning your hard drive, try to figure
out exactly which app is taking most of your space on your Mac with a
visual tool that will represent everything on your hard drive for
example Disk Inventory it creates a “tree map” of hard drive and
will reveal all the files on your hard drive. So with help of such
tool you can delete the unwanted files and can get back free space on
your hard drive.
Empty Your Trash :- User
must delete unnecessary or duplicate files from their Mac systems
because these files contains same content and waste the precious disk
space, user must give a check on such kind of files and should not
forget to empty the trash.
It will help in getting back the
disk space.
Delete Unused Languages Drivers:- If your startup disk is full? Then you must check whether your system (Mac) speaks too many languages. User must keep languages of its use only and should remove the unknown languages. By doing this user can save around 3 GB of disk space, but be warned because getting back those deleted languages files is not an easily reversible process.
These were few tips which can help
user to regain some free space back, whereas there are many tools
which can help users to clean their cluttered Mac OS X.
Third party tools that can help
clean a cluttered Mac OS X :–
- Stellar SpeedUp Mac
- Clean My Mac
- DetoxMyMac
- MacKeeper’s ‘Mac CleanUp
These steps are all well and good to
keep your Mac optimized and running smoothly, and do run periodic
cleanups like these to get everything back at their respective top
shape.