Since my budget doesn’t move as fast as the hard disk industry increases capacity, I periodically use OmniDiskSweeper to go through and clean a few gigabytes of dross off my MacBook Pro’s 80 GB drive. It’s necessary, because without going through the exercise, I end up with less than a gig of free drive space and everything grinds to a halt.
I don’t always remember where I find the disk space hogs, so this time I’m writing them down:
- A mail folder for the Blogcritics mailing list: 899 MB. (This one was a surprise, since I’ve been religiously deleting the mails since I stopped regularly writing for the site, but there was a ton of old mail in there.)
- Four iPhone software updates—I kept the last two or three there, but didn’t see the need for the 1.x updates or the first 2.0 one—about 800 MB.
- The ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Delicious Library Items folder. Appears to date to Delicious Library 1.0, since there’s also a Delicious Library 2 folder: 220.6 MB.
- ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Backups: old subscription lists, 289 of them: 90.9 MB.
- ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/SearchIndex: last updated in 2005. 146.3 MB.
- ~/Music/iTunes/Previous iTunes Libraries: three old copies from last year. About 250 MB.
What’s interesting this time is how little of this was real content as opposed to just old cache files. My free disk space now, even before a reboot (to clean up the VM and flush various other system caches), is up from 80 MB (yeah, I know) to 3.28 GB. Every little bit helps.