â€&lsqauo;Tackle 'you need to free up space' warning on your Mac
For example, in my iTunes library I have a number of songs that show in iTunes as only being one copy; however, if I go to the iTunes folder for many of them, there is clearly a second version of the song. While this may not appear to be much space used for a single song, it represents a large number of gigabytes collectively for all my iTunes songs.From here, you can manage any duplicate files you have created, by deleting the ones not linked to your library.Beyond application library contents, you can delve further into what might be using up your hard drive space by using a program like GrandPerspective or DaisyDisk to analyze your disk usage and give you a visual aid to what files and folders are the largest on your system.Using programs like these, you might find an unused collection of movies that you might have inadvertently duplicated, or you might find a massive system log file (which sometimes can become gigabytes in size), or other collection of files that appears to be massive, and remove them.These visual approaches for managing your hard drive's contents can also be beneficial for seeing what regular actions may be resulting in massive hard drive use. For instance, if you regularly take videos with your phone and synchronize them to your computer, then you might not realize the videos can take up many gigabytes, expanding your iTunes library to use a massive amount of your disk space.At this point, it is up to you how to proceed. For large libraries you can move them to an external hard drive, or downsize them by deleting unwanted content, and for files scattered on your hard drive, you can back them up to an external drive and then delete them. However, regardless of what you do, you should clear enough space to have about 10 percent of your hard drive's capacity free, since free space on the drive is required to allow the system to run smoothly.Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Be sure to check us out on Twitter.
