Macbook air start up disc full

JuneThompson said:

Thank you for your note. I do not download anything from the web. I do keep photos on the machine for one week, then I move them to "dropbox". when I move them, I remove them from my machine. Could "dropbox" take up space on my hard drive, even though it is in the cloud?

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Dropbox keeps a local copy of EVERYTHING you put in it, so yes.

The other thing is Gmail which I access through Mail. because Gmail is basically web based, it that taking up hard drive space??

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A tiny bit, but not significant.

Other than that, I have "clean my mac", and office for MAC.

that's it.
Thanks

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I'd be VERY VERY suspicious of "Clean My Mac" as it sounds a lot like MacKeeper, the rip-off of all rip-off fake utility programs.

But the more basic problem is that you've never told us the capacity of your boot drive, so it's impossible to know whether you have "too much stuff" on there or not!

MBAs generally come with either 64GB or 128GB drives, and that is plenty for a basic complement of apps, but will run out SUPER FAST when you start adding media files (images, music, videos) to it. This sounds like what has happened to you.

You don't have a lot of options here: it MAY be possible for you to get a larger SSD installed but I wouldn't recommend that route. The real answer is to move ALL your media libraries that are taking up large portions of your space onto an external hard drive (and that duplicated Dropbox folder as well). I've never tried with an SSD, but you can probably use Grand Perspective (free) to analyze what's taking up the space on your boot drive.