Running out of space.

Hey there everybody.
This is my first Mac (that i bought off of eBay around Feb (the iMac has Apple Care until September 2011)), and I am running low on space. With fathers day coming up I want an idea of what to request from the Mrs.

YOu see all of my specs below/beside here.. the only thing not mentioned is that I back up to a 1TB Seagate external using TM.

I included shots of my HDD and External to show the space left.

I am a normal person, this iMac is not used for work. Purely play. So the data that is occupying my HDD is dl'ed music, pictures, dl'ed movies, and some documents.

This iMac was a good deal on eBay, and money was an issue then so I wasn't pumped about paying A LOT more than what I did for a bigger internal HDD. As for the data on the drive increasing; the pictures will most likely keep growing, music is going to increase the fastest, and movies can be discarded as I get done consuming them. But I also want to avoid common mistake of not leaving ~30GB for OSX to function properly (i read that on the forums a lot).

So what should I do? Get a larger external drive? Have my ancillary materials (music/movies maybe pictures) get saved to the external INSTEAD of the HDD (how)? Just use my HDD for OSX and Apps?
Since I still have applecare I am not really cool with (or able to) put a SSD in this great piece of machinery. Down the road, maybe, but not now.

I am aware of Partitioning, is that something that could be useful to me? I think yes. Especially if I get a larger external (2 or 3 TB), and somehow make X% of the new drive an extension of my HDD. THen the remainder be used as the back up.
Or is that possible now? Partition my 1TB into 250GB/750GB or something along those lines, and do what i just mentioned above.

Any thoughts/corrections are welcome. Thanks

attn any moderator reading.. if this is better suited in Desktops, please feel free to move it there, thanks

The external is a Time Machine drive...

...and the Internal appears to be a little more than halfway full...


Your best option would be to attach another external, or replace the internal with a larger capacity drive.

Partitioning the drive won't do you much good...since if you partition it, the partition labeled Macintosh HD will contain all your files. You can use the remaining partition for other files, but there really is no point in doing that unless you plan on running Windows.

You cannot back up with Time Machine onto an internal drive.

You're not running low on space at all, so I'm not sure what the problem is.

You are anticipating a problem long before a problem actually exists, unless you plan on downloading a few hundred gig of stuff in the next couple of months ...

Still, I guess it's better to plan ahead than wait till the last minute -- so here's what I would do.

First, the files that ALWAYS take up the most room on a Mac (any Mac) are photos, music, videos and porn. Hey man, just tellin' it like it T-I-S.

iMovie doesn't care where you store your videos, it will find them -- so move the movie stuff onto the external. iTunes and iPhoto both support multiple libraries as well as libraries on external drives, so again you can move those folders to an external drive (each has different instructions -- posted on Apple's website -- about how to properly move a library to an external drive and get the respective programs to recognise that you've done this. Google it).

In short, once you have the instructions on how to move the videos, music and photos to an external drive, you'll be good to go for a long time to come. Don't forget, though, that all that stuff now on your external drive still needs to be backed up -- to a DIFFERENT external drive!

Luckily, hard drives are crazy cheap these days.

chas_m said:

First, the files that ALWAYS take up the most room on a Mac (any Mac) are photos, music, videos and porn. Hey man, just tellin' it like it T-I-S.

Click to expand...

Isn't "porn" covered by "photos... videos"?