Dealing with Bloatware
If the me from 10 years ago could hear the me now, he’d be laughing incredulously. “So, you’ve got an 80 gig hard drive in your laptop, and you’re telling me you don’t have enough space! WTF?” (Did they have WTF back in 1997?)
Yes, indeed, Apple have users of their notebooks in a bit of a constant quandary; the size of their hard drives versus the size of the software they suggest we put on those drives. Of course this forces us all to consider an upgrade to the latest model with the slightly bigger drive, which means Apple have us exactly where they want us – constantly on the upgrade path.
Personally, I have a MacBook Pro with an 80 gig hard drive. I have iLife, iWork, Logic Studio and Final Cut Studio. It’s impossible to fit them all on, so I have had to figure out some nifty ways to save space on my drive. Here’s 9 tips I can think of right now.
1 – Buy an external hard drive
OK, this is obvious, but who wants to deal with power cables and a brick in your bag all the time? That is, of course, unless your drive is a USB powered mini hard drive; the size of an old iPod, and with no cables apart from the USB one. I always keep one in my bag, and I plug it in when needed. All the support materials for the Pro software, my music library, and some of the lesser used applications sit on the external. I only need it when I need it, but if I didn’t have it, I guarantee I’d need it then! OK, it’s only 5400 RPM, but portability wins out over speed in this case. Try http://www.lacie.com for more information.
2 – Archive Stuff
Finished that project? Archive it to CD or DVD. Twice if you want to be safe, and store the archives in different locations.
3 – Learn how to make Unix aliases
So you can move files onto an external and leave pointers on the original drive. Try http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21134 for a contextual menu plugin.
4 – Don’t use iPhoto.
It’s a dog that doubles the amount of hard drive space you need for photos. Dump it I say!
5 – Purge Cache Files
Final Cut Pro render files? Logic Pro freeze files? DVD Studio Pro nonsense all over the place? Find them and destroy them! Don’t know where to find these files? Well maybe the next tip will help.
6 – Use Disk Inventory X
It’s a brilliant app that shows you exactly what’s on your hard drive and how big it is. Find the bloatware and kill it, or move it. Brilliant. Especially good for finding big big mostly useless caches from apps like Google Earth, Joost, DVD Studio Pro or Second Life.
7 – Use AppDelete
I love freeware and shareware but sometimes I end up accumulating it like 5 cent coins. (Taking up space in my wallet and no good at a parking meter!) Just turfing the application may not get rid of all the flotsam it leaves around the drive. Use AppDelete, and all files associated with the app (such as preferences and application support stuff) will also be deleted. Good riddance!
8 – Not a Garageband or Logic User?
Nothing hogs the hard drive like Garageband support files. Go to Library/Application Support/Garageband/ and dump it all. And then dump the app. Of course, if you use Logic, don’t do that, as Logic uses all that stuff!
9 – Take out some RAM
OK, I am scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but every byte of RAM uses up a byte of hard drive space, for the purposes of safety in case your machine’s battery dies mid-operation or whatever. So ironically, taking out a stick of RAM will give you that much hard disk space back! Not really recommended practice though!