160gb Hard Drive and never have any space

I waited almost a month about a year ago when I purchased my Mac Book pro 15", because I had to special order it to have a larger hard drive. I'm glad I did, but yet, I still have only 7-15 gb of space available most of the time. What is it that is clogging up my hard drive?

I keep all of my files (photos/videos/documents) on my external drives. The only thing I keep on my internal HD is my iTunes music which is about 10GB.

I come from a PC, so I'm used to going to Add/Remove programs to see what programs I have that take up the most room.

I'm a photographer and used to be a videographer, so I have a ton of software I use on my computer. Since I am no longer a videographer, I have gone as far as deleting all of my Final Cut Pro Studio 2 applications and even Garage band because I know it comes with a lot of sound clips and such. These are the software I have on my computer:

Leopard
Adobe Lightroom
Photoshop CS3
Illustrator CS2
MS Office
Final Cut Compressor is all I kept from the suite

I will have to think if I have any more, but everything else is little stuff such as what comes with the macbook pro or skitch and fetch and stuff like that.

My machine also takes a while to start up and to shut down, which started happening just since I installed Leopard, so that may not be related to the fact that I'm working with very little free hard drive space.

Please give me any tips on how to clean it out or if this is normal having the programs I have on my computer.

Thanks,

Andry

Give WhatSize a run on your internal hard drive, you might see what the problem is.

Report back so we know what gives. Good luck!

at the finder do a "find" (command f)

at the next screen enter the parameters of the search, leaving the search field blank

If "size" isn't available then click on the left most parameter (probably default of "kind")

Select "other", scroll down and select "size". Size will now show as an option.

You can now find files that are less than, greater than, equal to, or not equal to a given size

MacHeadCase said:

Give WhatSize a run on your internal hard drive, you might see what the problem is.

Report back so we know what gives. Good luck!

Click to expand...

This is your best bet. WhatSize is a great and simple to use app. Something is very definitely wrong. I have a MBP with only the 120 GB hard drive and even with EVERYTHING loaded on it, I still have about 60 GB left.

Granted, I don't store movies of any nature on my Mac, so the big space consumers are my iTunes collection (about 18 GB) and my photos (about 8 GB). Nonetheless, it sounds like you don't have anything excessive on your drive that you know about, so investigating what is taking up the space definitely seems in order.

the final cut studo applications themselves are only 2-3gb of space.. but what they put in the library is about 52-53gb of space.. and garage band itself is only about a half a gig, but again whats in its library is about 12gb.. so did you just delete the applications or their library entries too?

PowerbookG4 - That is what I am not very good at. I tried to go in and find everything that goes with the applications, but it is so hard to find everything. Will Whatsize show me those files easily too. I did go in and delete anything that said Final Cut and its accompanying files.

Mac57 - I'm glad this should not be. Now I'm really determined to find out what's going on. Thanks!

Okay all. My tech friend says why would I buy Whatsize when I could just use the finder. And now I've tried to use the finder for this before and it has not helped me with what I want.

But before I purchase, can you tell me what this application does that Finder doesn't?

Thank you!

Andry

For one thing, you see invisible files. If one of the apps is having a problem with getting rid of its temp files and they stay on your HD, you'll see it.

Oh and you can tell your tech friend you can use it in demo mode.

Dang! I just downloaded the latest version (got notified there was an update) and now the demo seems to limit your viewing capabilities to a chunk of 20GB unless you buy a licence, $12. Oh well!...

Yup, I saw that limitation and knew immediately that I would have to pay the $13. It's not a lot. I'm going to go ahead and get it and check it out. I like to see invisible files.

Try Disk Inventory X

http://www.derlien.com/

its FREE!!!!

Cool! Thanks! Does this display invisible files as well?