03-21-2011, 12:14 PM

Hi, I'm pretty new to Mac so please forgive me if I come off sounding like a moron.

Basically, I am trying to free up gigs on my Macbook. In looking in all my spots like Documents, Movies, Music, Pictures, Etc. I've figured out how many of my machine's 116 gb's are in each one using the 'Get Info' tab. In an effort to get my mac to speed up, I decided to store my movies and documents on USB Flash Drives to free up space.

Now, this worked great with the movies. But with the Documents, even after emptying all the contents of the Documents folder, my 'Get Info' tab tells me that there are still 12 gb's in that folder. But where, if it's empty?

Does anyone know why there seem to be 12 precious gb's hidden somewhere that I cannot see?

Thank you!

03-21-2011, 03:23 PM

You might want to try Disk Inventory X: Disk Inventory X

It'll scan your entire hard drive and break down all your used space. Very handy.

03-21-2011, 03:34 PM

You may have hidden temp files or other hidden documents that are not showing up. You can unhide all files in OS X to view them but it requires the use of terminal. Follow the directions exactly as given in the second post of this thread. Copy and paste them in Terminal. When you're finished removing or deleting whatever is hidden in Documents, be sure to turn hiding back on.

A note of caution: Do not delete any other hidden files or folders! Those that are hidden in Documents should be OK to delete. For safety sake, make a backup of your entire hard drive first. Use Time Machine or cloning software.

03-21-2011, 03:56 PM

As a suggestion .... deleting files to free up disk space is a temporary solution.
The real solution is extra hard disk space.

Before you go off deleting files, make sure yo have a backup

Cheers ... McBie

03-21-2011, 05:43 PM

Your suggestion worked! I downloaded Disk Inventory and as it turns out those 12 gigs are taken up by a folder called 'Microsoft Data' which must have something to do with my Office for Mac or Parallels programs. Looking further, it seems like a few of those gigs are actually recovered files that I don't need anymore, so I guess they just piled up.

The next question is do I need to keep a lot of these Microsoft items in order for my Mac Office or Parallels to work? If I trash them, am I also trashing the programs themselves?

03-25-2011, 05:39 PM

I don't know if you can just trash all that. I used Parallels briefly and hated it. But, my rule of thumb is that if I didn't create the file, or if I don't know exactly what the file does, I don't delete it.

McBie is correct when it comes to freeing up hard drive space. My 120 GB drive recently hit capacity (well, not quite, but it was obviously trending in that direction) and I upgraded to a 500 GB drive (WD Scorpio Blue). I have an old Macbook (2007) and everything is working fine. It only set me back $55, so I would recommend upgrading. You can always take your old internal drive, put it in an enclosure, and use it is an external for backups.

03-25-2011, 07:18 PM

That 12GB file is probably your Windows installation file that Parallels uses.