Hi y'all-

I'm on the road and my powerbook (40 gig HD) has gone from having ~500 MB available to ~0, and I don't really know what's going on, as I've- only download a few powerpoints for work and received the usual # of e-mails.

Other than a huge itunes library (which I'll save to my external HD when I get home), I don't know what's taking up most of the space- have been saving Office documents and other files over to my external HD, and don't have much in the way of media files (pics, vids, imovie, garage band, etc.) so I don't have that many obvious places to look for large files.

Was wondering if:
- there's a best way to see overall what's hogging my HD space so I can start purging files I don't need.

- there are good places to look for things to delete that 1.) I don't need (e.g., temp folders, caches), and 2.) I can just reinstall when I get home.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

OmniDiskSweeper sounds like it'll do what you want - it's free if you want to only use it to identify the files taking up space on your hard disk.

Try also OnyX to delete cache/log files - it's free, I've read about but never used it.

I second jhm on both counts. I use OnyX - it works well. Have you noticed this decline in drive space after using an application for a while? Safari and Firefox suck drive space away from me if I don't quit them after heavy use.

Also - while most apps do a pretty good job of cleaning up their work files when you quit them, they're not all 100 percent perfect all the time, and most can lose a file once in a while if the system crashes (fortunately rare with OS X). Do a Spotlight search for files with "work file" in their names and delete them. Then search for files with "temp" in their names and check those for deletability, too. Most files you get this way will be small, but, depending on what you've been working on, some may be large enough to notice.

You can also use Monolingual to remove unneeded languages. Also, if you don't use GarageBand, you can get rid of all its loops, which is several GBs.

Thanks for the advice- I made it back home, and disksweeper and OnyX did the trick- freed up 2 GB, which is more than I've had for a while!

Thanks again.

Also note that OS X dynamically allocates virtual memory. From the command line, 'ls -l /var/vm' (or 'ls -lh /var/vm' if you're not too familiar with the Unix command line and want it more readable.) You can see the swapfiles there. You start with one 64MB swapfile, and more are created as needed. A reboot will clear them out.

Of course rebooting is silly; it's better to just not end up with huge swapfiles. I've found the worst offender for memory usage is Safari. I find that if I restart Safari at least once a day (and empty its cache), it doesn't grow to huge proportions.

You can check the actual memory usage of your applications with 'top -o rprvt'. The number under the RPRVT column is the memory usage. Expect Safari to be way up there if it's been running for a while; I've had it grow past 500MB before. Horribly, leaky application (but otherwise a great browser!) If anything else is a huge memory hog you'll see it in there.

Good info so far. Just noticing that nobody brought up that having only 500MB of space free on a 40GB HD under any OS is typically bad. Mac OS handles this generally pretty well right up until you run out (at which point it can do really nasty things like not even boot, etc.)

You may find that you gain up to a couple GB after using something like OnyX. There are some log files which will run right up to the 2GB limit if they don't clear. In the latest versions of Tiger it's actually set up so that if your Mac is not awake in the middle of the night when the clearing scripts usually run, they will run the next time the computer is awake. Earlier systems need to do this manually every once in a while. OnyX and some other utilities have sprung up to take care of this.

That said, though, you really should bump off about 4GB at least to have 10% free. That would be better all around. (Some people suggest up to 20% free, but I think that's extreme in most cases.) Plus, after getting some free space, you might want to pick up something to optimize and defrag. Yes, there is a certain amount of defrag that happens automagically, but it doesn't cover everything, and a scenario like completely filling up the disk throws various things into disarray. It won't stop working without it, but it'll work more efficiently (faster) if you clean it up a bit.