The Case Of The Disappearing Hard Drive

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Ever since I upgraded to Leopard a few months ago, I've been plagued with disk space issues on my Macbook Pro. Normally, when shooting photographs, you use your hard drive as permanent storage and your compact flash cards as temporary storage. I had so little space on my hard drive during the Junos though that I was forced to reverse the two, and was literally using extra CF cards to make up the hard drive difference.

Today I sat down to see if I could figure out where it all went. The key application I used was Disk Inventory X, a great little tool that graphically displays where all your space is being used. In my case, it ended up being the following:

  • 20GB was stuck in a Previous Systems folder from when I upgraded to Leopard
  • 10GB was being used by Apple mail, since it was storing local copies of everything on Gmail
  • 10GB in random movies on my computer
  • 10GB in various random download folders

So, in about 30 minutes I managed to free up a little over 50GB, which now makes my laptop far more usable. I'm also going to pick up a miniature external hard drive for it at some point so I have extra storage available when on the road.

journal disk inventory x hard drive space leopard macbook pro