Going on a Data Diet

If you have followed The MacBook Air Conundrum by comments here or on Facebook, you know that my trusty black MacBook is up for auction on eBay and my new MacBook Air is en route.

I really wanted to try new solid-state disk instead of conventional hard drives (more on this in a future article) so it will arrive with a 64GB internal disk.

And my 160GB internal on the MacBook is nearly full.

I started by giving myself the drive before it got here: a 60GB partition on an external disk that I will just clone to Air once it arrives. The Air’s SSD will be 64GB but there will be some loss to formatting overhead.

First the obvious got copied: the System folder and all of the invisible UNIX underpinnings. I like to use Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner for this work. It does a fine job- download it and make a small donation for the time it saves you. Total used: about 7GB. Net gain: 0. Gotta have all this.

Then I proceeded to the Applications folder. This is where it starts to get interesting. It’s quite stunning just how many apps I have collected over the years. I went through the list and picked out only the apps that I have used within the last year, along with apps that Apple installs. Used: 4GB Net Gain: 10GB.

The Library folder gets really tough. Most people have no idea even what goes in here let alone if they really need it or not. Fortunately it’s my job to know or at least have a cursory knowledge of these items and their function. A lot of junk can end up here but just as much is vital for proper system operation. For reference, most of my savings came from tossing iDVD and GarageBand support files. Used: 9GB Net gain:7GB  (Still deciding if I want to toss 3GB of printer drivers.)

Now the real hard part, my home folder, which alone sits at 89GB. Here I am turning to a tool called OmniDiskSweeper. A free download, it “sweeps” your hard drive, calculating the size of contents an sorting all folders by size so you can quickly spot what is eating up the most space.

Then just like the Applications folder, it’s about whether I need this data on a daily basis. My email, all 4.5 GB of it is a microcosm of the rest of the folder. The most recent messages, of course get transferred. Anything older than January is getting archived. But then there’s a few folders that contain important reference messages. Those will stay as well, but it has to be done selectively. And so it goes for the rest of the home folder.

It might remind you of moving. Create a move pile, a sell pile, a garbage pile. But with data, as long as you have storage to accomodate it, you can keep it all. The difference is how quick and easy it is to get to the data. In my case, I’m scaling down to stuff I need when on the road with no Internet connection, or at your offices. Everything else is going on an external drive (for now) – it remains to be seen if the drive will travel with me (I carry one anyway for diagnostics) or remain home and accessible over the Internet. So I’ll still have it long term but it won’t be immediately available. I’ll have to connect to it somehow.

I’d love to give you a size estimate on the home folder and how much was saved, but that will just have to wait until next time – I’m still deciding what stays and what gets offloaded.  Stay tuned.

Leave a reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Name

Mail (will not be published)

Website (We will link to your site!)

CommentLuv Enabled: click this box to show your latest blog entry under your comment!

Click to cancel reply

Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail