MacFilter: Freeing up your Hard Disk

June 1, 2005 11:35 AM

MacFilter: I have a 14" iBook I bought last September and I have recently installed Tiger on it. My Hard Drive space is running low. I know about uninstalling language packs and getting rid of classic. Those are not options. I am looking for a uttility program that will hunt down and delete files from programs that are no longer installed.
posted by Livewire Confusion to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

Onyx is a nifty utility that saved my life when I was running Panther. I've sold my iBook, but Onyx allows you to force-run special utility scripts that delete temp files and are typically only are automated for 3Am or something, meaning many users have computers that are never cleaned.

After running the scripts once, I freed up about 2 gigs. And OSX was running a lot smoother. Maybe not exactly what you want, but the effect will be good.

Onyx also has a bunch of other features which are nice. Check it out.
posted by bennymoto at 11:48 AM on June 1, 2005

Ack, sorry I screwed up the hyperlink.

Onyx
posted by bennymoto at 11:49 AM on June 1, 2005

Response by poster: That won't run on Tiger; I just tried :-(
posted by Livewire Confusion at 12:24 PM on June 1, 2005

Try Cocktail
posted by Napierzaza at 12:34 PM on June 1, 2005

Ah that sucks. Found on version tracker comments, you might be able to get by with this workaround. Good luck.

For those of you that are brave, you might try to following to get version 1.49 running in Tiger. This post assumes the only problem is the authentication request that typically hangs after OnyX is started in Tiger.

Do a CTRL-click (contextual menu) on the OnyX icon and pick the SHOW PACKAGE option. This opens the package and presents the CONTENTS folder. Open the contents folder and then open the MacOS folder. Inside the MacOS folder should be an executable named OnyX. Double click this executable. It should open the program as a started process via a terminal window and the terminal window should open (if not, you will have to open a terminal window first and do the open via terminal). When the GUI dialog is presented to accept the admin password, go ahead and enter it. After entering the password into the GUI interface, the terminal window should display a PASSWORD prompt. Enter the password (again) into the terminal window at this prompt. If all when well OnyX should start running and allow you to pick the typical options (I run the automatic stuff). While you are running OnyX in this manner, the terminal window needs to stay open. Closing it will stop the execution of OnyX. Good luck with this. We all miss having OnyX to do maintenance, so maybe this will provide a bridge until the developer makes upgrades.

Brian Stevens

posted by bennymoto at 12:36 PM on June 1, 2005

How about OmniDiskSweeper (which I myself have not yet tried)?
posted by mcwetboy at 12:39 PM on June 1, 2005

Following up on my previous comment. I just tried OmniDiskSweeper myself, and it isn't quite what you're looking for: it scans the disk and gives you how much space each folder/file is taking up, but it doesn't identify which files are deletable and which ones aren't; that's up to you. But it's a way, I suppose, of finding out that there's a 200 MB file kicking around that you didn't know about. (Or, in my case, 108 MB of iPod Software Updaters.)
posted by mcwetboy at 1:01 PM on June 1, 2005

WhatSize scans a drive and tells you how much space each of your directories are taking up. I found it the other day and freed up about 4 gigs, mostly leftovers from application s I had deleted (for example, I'd deleted Garageband, but not all the support files, which were at least a gig).
posted by o2b at 2:15 PM on June 1, 2005

I don't know if you've considered a bigger drive, but it might be a smart upgrade. a newer 5400rpm drive will give you a nice performance bump, over your original drive (4200rpm) And you'll gain some elbow room to boot. You can get an 80gb 5400rpm hitachi for about 120 bucks. The install is not-trivial on an ibook however.
posted by freq at 2:49 PM on June 1, 2005

I've had pretty good luck with Disk Inventory X, which doesn't delete things for you, but will give you a pretty good idea of what exactly *is* eating up all of your disk space. Also, it's pretty.
posted by tew at 3:06 PM on June 1, 2005

The reason this program doesn't really exist for the Mac is because it's not really a problem on it -- applications don't shower shit everywhere like they do on Windows. Almost everything is kept "inside" the app's icon itself, so when you trash that it all goes. The only other usual places stuff will be put is ~/Library/Application Support, which even on this well-used system is only weighing in at 200mb.
posted by bonaldi at 6:20 PM on June 1, 2005

If you just want something that tells you the sizes of directories on your hard drive, you don't even have to install some program (though they may produce nicer output than this), just open a terminal window and type "du | sort -n | less" in your home directory (or somewhere else). You could also do "du | sort -n > ~/sizes.txt" and then open the file in your home directory called sizes.txt in some text editor.

You should also check the directory "/cores" to make sure it's empty. Any file in there will be the result of some crash, will be quite large, and you should be able to safely delete it.
posted by advil at 6:38 PM on June 1, 2005