So I went about downloading the latest games on the Mac App Store when I was hit with a message telling me I had 1GB of space left. I was shocked. Considering I had about 150GB last month, I was astonished at how much space games took and how it all added up in the end. So to help you and me out I have scoured the internet for the best and cheapest programs to clean your Mac hard drive.
Finding What is Taking Up Space
These are applications that help you find the big files on your Mac that take up the most space.
Disc Inventory X scans your computer and then displays a graphical representation of your hard drive with the biggest files and folders filling up the screen more. This is a brilliant way to get an idea of how much space certain applications are taking up. Once you have determined the applications that are taking up the most space you can navigate to them and delete them manually. The best thing is that the application is completely free.
Omni Disk Sweeper enables you to find out what files are clogging up your Mac by just looking through your folders in the familiar panels window. As you open different files, Omni Disk Sweeper shows the folders size in ascending order with a colour code system to show the files bigger than 1MB and 1GB. Omni Disk Sweeper is also completely free, so why not give it a try?
Regaining that Space
So you have found the files that are taking up the most space, but now you need to delete it efficiently, or find a way to delete hidden useless files.
Deleting Applications
Read our ‘Uninstalling Mac Apps‘ Article for tips and tricks on efficiently uninstalling your unwanted applications.
The Macintosh supports multi-language support. However, when do you think you are going to need to change your Mac to speak Mongolian (unless of course unless you are Mongolian)? All these files translated into a ton of different files to support different languages clog up your hard drive, and you are probably not going to use them. Monolingual allows you to select the languages that you don’t want and then it will delete the relevant files. This is a quick and easy way to regain space on your Mac, however beware because if yu delete a language you cannot regain support for it without reloading Mac OSX onto your Mac.
Clusters – Free Trial ($12.95 Full Version)
Clusters boasts easy compression. All you need to do is open the application, drag in your big files and then watch as the application compresses the files. File compression makes the file much smaller. Clusters even keeps track of the space gained because of it which is a neat feature. However the free version only allows you to regain 50MB before you need to buy the full version which costs $12.95. [NOTE: Only available for Macs running 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or later]
So if you adopt all of these tips then you are sure to regain at least a bit more space on your computer to last you a few more game downloads.
