So thin, so light, so…easy to fill with cruft. Saving space on your Mac’s hard drive is more important than ever, especially if you use one with a faster but smaller solid state drive in it, like my Macbook Air. Being able to...
So thin, so light, so…easy to fill with cruft. Saving space on your Mac’s hard drive is more important than ever, especially if you use one with a faster but smaller solid state drive in it, like my Macbook Air. Being able to manage your space wisely is the key here, and once you’ve done the obvious things, like pare down your Applications folder and delete all those iMovie source files, it’s time to get trick, and a bit advanced. Here’s five things that you can do to get rid of hard drive bloat, if you dare. Delete User Cache Files Saving space on your Mac hard drive is a key strategy, especially when you’re using a Macbook Air, with it’s strictly solid state drive (SSD). Even if you’re using a desktop Mac with a hard drive that seemed like “plenty of space” when you bought it, there will come a time when you’ll be looking to save some of it for more data. Why not get rid of the non-essential stuff on your Mac’s hard drive? When you delete apps to help recover disk space, they can leave user cache files behind. These are the files that help improve the performance of OS X and various apps that are installed on your Mac. If you’re no longer using an app, you can delete these files to free up some space. Here’s how. In the Finder, press Command-Shift-G or click on the Go menu, selecting Go To Folder. In the resulting field, type or paste ~/Library/Caches/. This will bring up the folder that contains the user caches. Once there, you’ll want to sort the list by size, which means you’ll want to set up that window to calculate all the sizes of files and folders. Go to the View menu and choose Show View Options, or hit Command-J on your keyboard. Click the checkbox next to Calculate All Sizes and then close the View window. Your Mac will now show a number for everything in that Finder window, including folders. Now, if you don’t already, set the window to List view, either in the View menu or with a Command-2 on the keyboard. You’ll now see all the biggest cache files near the top of the list (if you only see the smaller files at the top, click on Size again at the top of the column), and you can delete stuff that you no longer need. Spotify can have a bigger user cache file, as can some gaming apps. Be careful not to remove anything you think you might need, of course. If you delete something that an app you still use needs, you might see some weird stuff go on with it. Via: OS X Daily Delete Unwanted Speech Voices From Your Mac Hard drive space is at a premium these days, with files getting larger and solid state drives (SSD) becoming more affordable and ubiquitous. I’m typing on a Macbook Air right now, and making sure I don’t clutter up the drive with unnecessary files is important to me. One way to do this is to get rid of the voices that Mac OS X uses for text-to-speech. These files can take up a decent amount of space, which may well be why iOS only allows the one onboard, now that I think about it. Anyway, if you’re not using those text-to-speech voices, you might as well clear them off your drive and save some space. Here’s how. If you want to get rid of the whole kit and caboodle at once, launch Terminal from the Applications folder, the dock, or with an app launching system, like Alfred. Type or paste the following command: cd /System/Library/Speech/ This will change the directory (cd) you’re focusing on to the one in which the speech files are contained. To delete them all, simply type or paste the following: sudo rm -rf Voices/* This will dump every single text-to-speech voice on your system, so don’t do it if you want to keep one or more voices. In that case, navigate to the /System/Library/Speech/Voices/ folder on your hard drive and delete the voices you aren’t going to use, like Cello, or Bahh. Because, really, how often do you have your Mac read to you in th
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about 1 hour ago
