Disk cleanup before cloning a drive?

I'm looking to clean up the HD of my 2012 MBP as much as possible before creating a startup clone.

Cleaning out my user data seems easy enough (my documents, my downloads, iTunes library, iPhotos library, etc). Just curious if there are any other OSX system folders worth cleaning out at the same time? Any (unbeknownst to me) file directories that tend to build up clutter?

I would suggest that is a mistake and recommend you create the clone first.

Then do any cleanup you may want to do.

After any cleaning, and verifying everything is still working properly: re-clone. With the paid version of either CCC or SD!, this should be fairly quick as they will both do incremental backups after the initial clone.

bobtomay said:

I would suggest that is a mistake and recommend you create the clone first.

Then do any cleanup you may want to do.

After any cleaning, and verifying everything is still working properly: re-clone. With the paid version of either CCC or SD!, this should be fairly quick as they will both do incremental backups after the initial clone.

Click to expand...

Thanks Bobtomay for your comments - I'm about to clone both on my computers w/ CCC and was wondering about 'preparing' the drives. I have an OWC drive arriving this week which I'll partition to place both my MBPro & iMac clones on the one drive - hope all works. Dave

As long as your Mac has a bootable recovery partition, CCClone will recognise it and ask to separately copy that before it clones the OS with your system and data.

bobtomay said:

I would suggest that is a mistake and recommend you create the clone first.

Then do any cleanup you may want to do.

After any cleaning, and verifying everything is still working properly: re-clone. With the paid version of either CCC or SD!, this should be fairly quick as they will both do incremental backups after the initial clone.

Click to expand...

Exactly what I was thinking as soon as I read the original post. Another +1 for bobtomay.

What tools would you suggest to help "clean up" — after putting the original on the shelf and working on the clone? How to eliminate duplicate files, for example? What if the same large file(s) exist in multiple folders/directories. Are there any good tools that show you all (or each of) the dups and let you choose which one to keep... assuming the contents are the same, maybe the dates are different. For some, you may want to keep the oldest, and for others you want to keep the newest, on a directory -by- directory decision. Maybe there are tools you would recommend that can help with this?

I do not now, nor have I ever used any sort of software specifically designed to find duplicate files during the 30+ years that I've owned a personal computer.

First off, I typically know when I've created duplicate files...
I've copied an app from downloads into the Applications folder.
Started iTunes over setting up a new library.
Copied a file from one place to another.
I delete any dups at the time I create the copy after verifying the copy is good.

Second off, imho, a duplicate file finder is just a big humongous waste of time.

I do typically have some piece of software that will find duplicated files as a part of it's package.
Currently, I use WhatSize for looking at my drive to find what stuff is taking up space on my drive. I like it and recommend it - Want a free one, grab DiskInventory X.
I will note, I paid for WhatSize back when I was running 10.4 and have yet had to pay for an upgrade to it yet. It's been worth every penny.
I have looked at the duplicate files these tools will find from time to time. As far as I can remember, I have never deleted a single file using a duplicate finder.

Just as a test, I ran the duplicate file finder in WhatSize on my Mac this morning.
It did indeed find thousands of what are supposedly duplicate files.

The first 50 or so are all Steam game files - none of them are duplicates as they are just maps of different areas - or maps of the terrain in different areas - each file with a different name. Sorry, but I'm not touching the system files of my games.

Then I have a few that are picture dups - for example - one pic is in my Aperture library, the other is in my iPhone backup - not touching either one of those either.
Have a couple of app dups because I haven't emptied my downloads folder yet.

A few more examples like the above, then I'm down to files that are in the 1 MB size range and smaller. Meaning, I would have to manually go through, look at, decide whether a particular file is actually a duplicate and which one I can delete - and then manually delete 1,000 or more files to regain 1 GB of space???? Sorry, but even on my limited 250 GB SSD - no freaking way am I going to spend the time trying to manually remove 1,000 files to save 1 GB of space - not happening in this lifetime.

Edit:
If I get to the point of feeling I'm getting too much crud on my computer - I clean install OS X and clean install the apps I want.
Last time I did that was when 10.6 was released - unlike my Windows gaming days when those machines got a clean install every 6 months and in those days I had to build a new computer or at least upgrade the video card once every 12 months because the newest game wouldn't play on the one I had.