As I am preparing for my switch to the new MacBook coming my way (right now, it’s in Anchorage), I decided to clean the amount of data I was living with. After all, less data to transfer is faster setup.
Of course, you can do it the old-fashioned way:
- Go through each directory by hand
- Sort by size
- Remove the biggest offender.
However, this is tedious, to say the least. Yes, I’m sure there’s a nifty shell script that does exactly that job. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could actually see all your disk space usage in one picture, and quickly spot the largest offender? Well, you can. DiskInventoryX does exactly that job. If you’re on the PC, fear not - this is inspired by the Windows tool WinDirStat, so you can get pretty much the same tool. And for the Linux aficionados, there’s KDirStat
So here’s a snapshot of my disk pre-cleaning:
All the big red and blue chunks? Those are audio and video files, respectively. That reminded me to move the video files to the Mac Mini instead - there’s no point in carrying them on my laptop. Apart from that, it helped spot a couple rather big files in other locations. A first pass yielded savings of about 3GB.
One additional hint for the Mac-Heads out there: If you’re doing software development, cleaning out ~/Build is an excellent plan. It’s only temporary files, and it gave another 200 MB of space for me.
That tool is pretty, but I prefer WhatSize for cleaning out drives. http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/index.php
It is faster (I think) and makes it easier to do it the old-fashioned way.