SWEEP YOUR DRIVE CLEAN!
IS YOUR MAC’S HARD DRIVE BURSTING AT THE SEAMS?
WE’LL SHOW YOU HOW TO TRIM THE FAT WITHOUT
RESORTING TO ANY DIGITAL DIET FADS. BY BEN HARVELL
Back when you bought your shiny new Mac, didn’t it seem like there was an ocean of available space on your hard drive? Even if you made
that purchase in the last five years, your capacity probably ranges from just over 100GB to a whopping 500GB or even 1TB. Surely, with
that much space to play with, you could never completely fill up your giant drive? Then, of course, you install software. Professional tools
like Adobe’s Creative Suite or consumer options like iLife begin eating away at that formerly huge swath of space. Then you add your
i Tunes library, and another few gigabytes trickle away. Storage continues to be swallowed each time you download a new TV series or
movie in glorious, space-hungry high definition. And don’t forget about the PDFs that languish in your Downloads folder—or the digital
wasteland that is your Trash can.
Ultimately, everything you add to a drive takes up space, so the tricky questions become: What takes up the most space? What files do
you really need? And how do you shake loose some spare gigabytes without adding a new drive? We’ll show you the best ways to figure out
what you can axe, then we’ll reveal the secret places that junk hides and share some power-user tips for scaring up some storage space.
