Question for the Mac Savvy

Hello all!

New to the forum (1st post) and relatively new to the Mac.

I have a question I cannot seem to find the answer to anywhere. I was hoping someone could offer a bit of wisdom.

My question is this:

When I run SOFTWARE UPDATE, I FREQUENTLY (like most I am sure) get relatively large updates for iTunes, Quicktime, Java and the like.

Does OS X delete the previously downloaded and unneeded updates for these systems, or am I really losing 50-90mb of drive space each time I update one of the systems?

If there is a way to clean up the old stuff, or do I just keep losing more and more HD space each time I run Software Update?

I only have a 100 GB drive on my laptop and at this rate, I will be out of space soon! (I have a very large iTunes & photo and video collection)

Thanks a million,

PaddyMac
Stuart, Florida

What the updates do is replace old files with new ones, and add any additional files needed for the update. So no, you aren't losing space the size of the entire update, just a portion of it, and how much depends solely on each update.

With a large photo and music collection, you want want to look into investing in an external hard drive and storing your collections there.

Thanks Kash! I have been kicking around the idea of an external hard drive for some time now, but just haven't done it. I've backed everything up on CD-R for safety but yeah, an external is definitely the better way to go.

Any recommendations for a large capacity, (yet small) EHD?

Paddy

There are already many posts on here about how to move large photos and music collections to an external.

You can do a search but if you cannot find the answer i have some solutions on file

also here are plenty of USB2 externals that are pretty inexpensive, I have one of those FREE AGENT EXTERNALS