Make room for the good stuff - How to cleaning up your Mac OS X HDD

Seems harddisk space is never going to be enough, unlike my friend Niels, who got the luxury to upgrade his macbook hdd (see his experience in upgrading his harddisk in the earlier blog), I decide to take a slightly bargain approach : cleaning up some harddisk space. Here is what I did:

1. Clean up unnecessary language and other files using Monolingual.

OS X and many other applications installs with many different language packs, by removing them off, it will save lots of space from the harddisk. I am not going to need my application shows up in French or Korean, since I willhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif never be able to read them any way. I simply download the Monolingual from . Mount the disk image, and run monolingual directly from the image file.

I choose to keep only english and chinese (this only affects the user interface of the application, your application can still read korean or japanese files, or browse french websites, since the actual font file still remains). I also choose to remove all the G3/G4/G5/Intel 64 architecture, this is especially helpful for universal binary applications, those application comes with power pc binaries which is not needed on an intel mac. Monolingual is smart enough to keep the power pc binary if the application is power pc only.

the whole process took almost half an hour, and it removes 2GB from my hdd .. nice ..

2. Using Omni Disk Sweeper to remove unwanted large files/folders

OmniDiskSweeper is a real nice tool to identify and remove unwanted stuff. It will scan through the entire drive and sort the directory/files according to their size. Similar to unix DU command but much more easier to use.

I was very surprised to find out most of the iLife applications are huge space hogger, especially garage band, it installs at least 2-3G of music sample loops files etc, unless you need them, you can probably safely remove many of them. iDVD/iPhoto/iMovie also come with many huge theme files, which I rarely use.

One feature I like about this application is its sorting of folders according to its size and it does the same for all levels of subfolder. It really helps me in focusing on the major space hoggers. It also has a one click delete button tool, which you can use if you apply for a trial one day key (well one day is all you need to do this).

Now I only wish to find a good/free disk defragement tool, since I am sure now there is little spaces every where between the sectors. Any good suggestions?

this post is originated at Justin's personal blog (click here to see the original post and many others)