Free utilities to clean up full iBook OSX hard drive?

June 17, 2004 2:42 PM

My hard drive is full. Can anyone recommend a (free?) utility or technique for clearing out all the waste on my computer (iBook running OS X 10.3.4)? (overflowing inside)

I know that the obvious solution is to delete all of my old documents, trim down my mp3 collection, and so on. I'm talking more about deleting old cookies, temporary internet files, preferences to programs i no longer run, etc. i.e. the stuff I would probably miss even if I did have the time to manually sort through my entire hard drive. I'm also looking for a utility that could show me all of the files that i haven't used in a while sorted by size.

Finally, I keep coming back to my room and finding the "your hard drive is almost full" warning popup, even though i've still got a few hundred MB left and have been deleting a few things (mostly small files) every time i get it. Is there something new being constantly created while I'm away that keeps filling it up, or is this just a general warning that pops up at random? The only thing I could think of would be incoming emails taking up space, but I was under the impression that each email was pretty small, and I only get like half a dozen per hour, including junk. Currently I'm running AIM, Mail, Safari, Word, TextEdit, iCal, and Excel - do any of them generate temporary files or the like without any prompting?

posted by rorycberger to Computers & Internet (21 answers total)

Well, Mac OS X is Unix-like, and presumably keeps logs of various system and application messages. You might look at using something like XOverload to clean out both browser cache files and localization files for languages you aren't likely to use, which can save you > 100 MB.
posted by nicwolff at 2:59 PM on June 17, 2004

It's possible that something is spewing out log messages and continually adding them to a log file somewhere. Certain badly behaved printer and scanner drivers are known for this -- do you have a printer or scanner?

Run /Applications/Utilities/Console, and take a look at the system and console logs (you can open both from the File menu). Generally you shouldn't see much happening in there. If you see any messages that keep periodically happening, even when you're not using the machine, let us know what they are.
posted by xil at 3:10 PM on June 17, 2004

Actually, the more I look at XOverload the less I like it. Try Delocalizer - while that page says it hasn't been tested under 10.3, the VersionTracker page for it has comments from happy 10.3.3 users...
posted by nicwolff at 3:10 PM on June 17, 2004

Also, give OmniDiskSweeper a try.
posted by xil at 3:11 PM on June 17, 2004

Response by poster: here's an excerpt from the console log, not sure what this means or if its normal:

Jun 17 03:17:27 Rory-Bergers-Computer kernel: IOAudioStream[0x10c6900]::clipIfNecessary() - Error: attempting to clip to a position more than one buffer ahead of last clip position (0,702)->(2,2ffb).
Jun 17 03:17:27 Rory-Bergers-Computer kernel: IOAudioStream[0x10c6900]::clipIfNecessary() - adjusting clipped position to (2,702)
Jun 17 03:19:04 Rory-Bergers-Computer kernel: IOAudioStream[0x10c6900]::clipIfNecessary() - Error: attempting to clip to a position more than one buffer ahead of last clip position (6,1539)->(9,11a6).
Jun 17 03:19:04 Rory-Bergers-Computer kernel: IOAudioStream[0x10c6900]::clipIfNecessary() - adjusting clipped position to (8,1539)
Jun 17 03:19:42 Rory-Bergers-Computer lookupd[374]: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Jun 17 03:49:43 Rory-Bergers-Computer lookupd[374]: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Jun 17 03:49:43 Rory-Bergers-Computer lookupd[374]: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Jun 17 05:54:44 Rory-Bergers-Computer lookupd[374]: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Jun 17 07:24:41 Rory-Bergers-Computer kernel: IOAudioStream[0x10c6900]::clipIfNecessary() - Error: attempting to clip to a position more than one buffer ahead of last clip position (1,df8)->(2,2a85).
Jun 17 07:24:42 Rory-Bergers-Computer kernel: IOAudioStream[0x10c6900]::clipIfNecessary() - adjusting clipped position to (2,df8)
posted by rorycberger at 3:29 PM on June 17, 2004

one of these may help, and i also removed all the languages except for English, Spanish, French, and Japanese--it saved me tons of megs.
posted by amberglow at 3:30 PM on June 17, 2004

Response by poster: here's a tidbit from the system log as well. It might be relevant that I am connected to the internet via a wireless campus network (dartmouth's).

Jun 17 07:30:12 Rory-Bergers-Computer configd[86]: AppleTalk shutdown
Jun 17 07:30:12 Rory-Bergers-Computer configd[86]: AppleTalk shutdown complete
Jun 17 07:30:13 Rory-Bergers-Computer configd[86]: AppleTalk startup
Jun 17 07:30:16 Rory-Bergers-Computer configd[86]: AppleTalk startup complete
Jun 17 07:35:51 Rory-Bergers-Computer configd[86]: AppleTalk shutdown
Jun 17 07:35:51 Rory-Bergers-Computer configd[86]: AppleTalk shutdown complete
Jun 17 07:35:52 Rory-Bergers-Computer configd[86]: AppleTalk startup
Jun 17 07:35:55 Rory-Bergers-Computer configd[86]: AppleTalk startup complete
Jun 17 10:34:55 Rory-Bergers-Computer ntpd[293]: time reset -0.260663 s
Jun 17 10:34:55 Rory-Bergers-Computer ntpd[293]: synchronisation lost
Jun 17 13:39:33 Rory-Bergers-Computer lookupd[374]: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
posted by rorycberger at 3:32 PM on June 17, 2004

also, if you can afford it, a cheap firewire external drive really helps...put everything (apps, fonts, games, etc) that you only use once in a while on there.
posted by amberglow at 3:32 PM on June 17, 2004

Well, it doesn't look like anything's spewing too much log stuff (the stuff you're showing is not much in the scheme of things). So scratch off that possibility.
posted by xil at 3:51 PM on June 17, 2004

Chances are OSX has find (side question: is there a list of what "standard unix things" are and aren't included in a a default OSX install? It would sure help answering questions like these).

find / -type f -atime +90 -exec 'du' '{}' ';' | sort -n | tail -50 can give you the fifty largest files on your harddrive that haven't been accessed in the last 90 days. Accessed means read or written to by anything, so that needn't be you, it could also be backup software etc. There's a lot prettier and shorter way to do this with zsh by the way, but I'm assuming that's not installed.
posted by fvw at 4:07 PM on June 17, 2004

A friend of mine told just a week ago that OSX performs some "maintenance" at 03.00 clock in the morning for some obscure reason. And if your machine ain't "on" then, it won't do those operations (emptying cache etc.). Haven't really tried it out yet.


I also noticed (20M iBook 10.3.4 myself too) that it really isn't a good idea to have your X on a small partition. I used to have that disk space notice popping up although I had almost 1GB free... I re-partitioned (used to have 3, now 2, one would really be the choice for normal use.) my HD and now everything is ok.
posted by hoskala at 4:18 PM on June 17, 2004

Does anybody what that "maintenance" is about?
posted by hoskala at 4:19 PM on June 17, 2004

Finally, I keep coming back to my room and finding the "your hard drive is almost full" warning popup, even though i've still got a few hundred MB left...

The OS needs to leave itself swap space. Anything less than 500MB is going to cause "almost" full messages and potentially start making applications behave unpredictably.

side question: is there a list of what "standard unix things" are and aren't included in a a default OSX install? It would sure help answering questions like these

Darwin is a full BSD. Though not exhaustive, ">here's the list of man pages: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/index.html

There's a lot prettier and shorter way to do this with zsh by the way, but I'm assuming that's not installed.

/bin/zsh is included
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 4:27 PM on June 17, 2004

A friend of mine told just a week ago that OSX performs some "maintenance" at 03.00 clock in the morning for some obscure reason.

Does anybody what that "maintenance" is about?

It's the /etc/periodic/* scripts. There are daily, weekly, and monthly scripts for doing things like purging old logs and temp files, updating the database used for Find commands, etc. The default is for them to run late at night. The assumption is that (a) the computer is on but (b) not being used much or at all at that hour. If those aren't valid assumptions for your Mac, here are a bunch of apps to check out.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 4:37 PM on June 17, 2004

Disk Inventory X will inventory your hard drive and give you a cool visual map of what's using up all that space. (The program is free, license is GPL.) Whenever I've started running low, I run this and find that I forgot that Quake was so damned big, or that I've got some really huge GarageBand songs sitting around, or what have you.

Also, you could check to see if you have extra language packs installed from when you installed Mac OS X (as suggested by nicwolff), and remove those. I recommend Monolingual for that purpose. (Also GPL.) It'll save you a couple of hundred MB, if you've got extra languages, as you likely do.
posted by waldo at 4:57 PM on June 17, 2004

Thanks for the tip ncm.

I also noticed that the goddamn install program tries to install foreign language packs worth 'bout 200MB. Always install custom.

Havent' been using a lot of that good 'ole Mandarin China lately...
posted by hoskala at 5:06 PM on June 17, 2004

Response by poster: thanks for all the tips! using omni discsweeper, I see that there is a folder called receipts in the Library that is almost 100 MB. The stuff inside is greek to me, though sorted by application. Is this stuff important or trash? to me "receipts" implies that its just a record of something old, but I don't want to throw it away without checking.
posted by rorycberger at 5:18 PM on June 17, 2004

It's included? Oh goody. In that case, in zsh: du **/*(a+90OL[1,50]). Ok, so perhaps it isn't much prettier, but it is a hell of a lot shorter.
posted by fvw at 5:42 PM on June 17, 2004

Don't delete anything in /Library/Receipts -- it's a record of what has been installed on your machine. Software Update will probably get confused if you start removing things from it.
(and 100MB isn't totally out of line -- mine is 90MB)
posted by xil at 5:43 PM on June 17, 2004

Did you always run Panther? If you upgraded from Jaguar you might have a "Previous Systems" folder: that can go.

Or Classic. Do you ever, ever use it? Bin it.

What about iMovie? If you use it, have you emptied the scratch?

Or go into the Finder, open your hard disk, set to list view, apple-J, click "Calculate all sizes" and give it a while to think. Then in the size column you should see where the big stuff is.
posted by bonaldi at 7:19 PM on June 17, 2004

Or Classic. Do you ever, ever use it? Bin it.

Good one. If you have no intention of ever using Classic again, you can take back at least 200MB by deleting "Applications (Mac OS 09)" (not "Applications") and "System Folder" (not "System").
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 10:39 PM on June 17, 2004