How can I clean up my Mac startup disc?

[crishy]

I have a 2008 Macbook (more detail below) and recently it has been taking 10 minutes to start up and telling me that the startup disc is full. When I start up it goes to a blue screen for 10 minutes then lets me log in and everything seems fine. However, when I add new music to iTunes or photos to iPhoto it tells me that my startup disc is full. I hardly have anything on it except for music, photos, and a few college essays. What can I do to clean up my startup disc?

 

Laptop info: 2008 Macbook, Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Memory: 4GB

Disc Usage: Space Free = 2/227GB

System Memory: 2.88/4GB free

I have about 6,500 photos on iPhoto and 44GB of music on iTunes.

 

[wgscott]

Get an external hard drive and move your photos and music to it.

 

Then delete them from your internal drive.

 

Use the command

 

du -h -d 1  

 

to see what other subdirectories are populated with large files or large quantities of files.

 

Delete caches, etc.

 

Here's some free maintenance utilities: Titanium's Software • Index page

[Jud]

Here's some free maintenance utilities: Titanium's Software • Index page

 

Thanks, that's several times various folks have mentioned Onyx - maybe this time I'll remember.

[Audio_ELF]

Before doing anything ... check that your iPhoto and iTunes libraries are where you think they are and ensure you do a backup. Maybe even worth getting a drive and doing a Carbon Copy Clone (or similar) before even starting to clean things up.

 

Another thing ... just check you don't need to empty your Trash can ... if you are used to Windows where it automatically empties the oldest things you might not realise you have to manually empty it.

 

Disk Inventory X is a useful utility for checking where all your disc space has gone too...

 

Eloise

[avta]

You might also consider using a maintenance/cleaner program regularly as noted above. ( Onyx ) I use Cocktail (Cocktail - A perfect mixture for Mac OS X ) You might want to run one of these to see if some of the problems resolve.

[Paul R]

I agree with the greatest amount of advice already put out. What I would do *first* is go grab a larger external drive and clone the internal drive to it. Then you can always boot off the external disk and get back to where you started.

 

I would bet though, that buying a larger drive, will solve your boot up problem though. If so, that really bespeaks it is time for you to look at a small NAS, or just upgrading the MacBook to a newer unit with a larger drive.

 

-Paul