fred avolio's musings

I needed to free up space on my 12″ PowerBook G4 today. I noticed a sluggishness. Then I got an error in iPhoto as I was modifying a photo. (I had previously downloaded some Christmas photos and before that downloaded new music I received for Christmas.) It told me I was low on space.

Using I checked the “info” about my Macintosh HD. Sure enough, it was nearly completely full.

First, I deleted the GarageBand application and associated files. I had never uninstalled it although I meant to. I don’t use it, nor can I imagine ever using it.

I also deleted the Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Garageband directory as well as the Macintosh HD/Users/Shared/GarageBand Demo Songs folder.

Using “du” in a Terminal window, I found that my iTunes and Pictures folder were (as I figured) quite large. Using a program called WhatSize, I dug around and basically confirmed that my photos, though taking up a lot of space, were not the big user. iTunes was.

And given that there are convenient ways to move my music to another drive, that is what I decided to do. First, I tried to follow the instructions for How To: Back up your music using iTunes 7. I could not use iTunes back-up facility though because I did not want to burn my music to CDRs and my PowerBook does not have a DVD burner! No worries. I back up my system regularly (as I mentioned in my discussion of System Back-ups. I have 2 copies of my music library already. I followed most of the instructions in How To: keep your iTunes library on an external hard drive. Make sure you read “The Gotchas.” Really, the only downsize is that if I forget to fire up the external drive, iTunes eventually complains.

All told, I cleared up 25G.

Macworld, regarding saving space on the MacBook Air, has an article applicable to saving space on any Mac, called Fitting your files on a MacBook Air. Speaking of storage, what do you think of Jungle Disk?

My friend, fellow Mac-user, and long-time colleague David Strom, sent the following: I recently did a lot of research for an article that is going to appear (hopefully) in the NYTimes this mo. on online backup. Jungledisk is cheap, but it is also slow. If you do a full backup of your drive, it will take several days. It really isn’t for disaster recovery, but more for let’s say another place to store stuff that is offsite. The trick is keeping it up to date once you go thru the process of getting all the files up there. I think for 1 GB it was like a buck a month. AOL Xdrive has a Mac access, but it is thru the Web (I think, I can’t remember all the variations now, I tested a bunch of them). In any event, you can see more specifics here: onlinebackup.html David Thanks, David!