Free Up HD Space?

Where's the best place to get help freeing up HD space?
I have 3G left available on my HD.
I have two Library folders. One with over 50G and one with 4 Gig and I don't know why or what I can or cannot do with them. Obviously I'm new at this. Thanks for your patience.

ps. what does "post a poll" mean?

Welcome to the Mac Forums.

I always advise new users not to attempt to free up hard drive space simply because in the process, they may wind up doing harm. (Removing needed files and folders)

The best advice I can give you is to purchase a larger internal hard drive or as an alternative an external hard drive to move things like music and photos to.

You didn't provide us with any info about your Mac or which version of OS X you're using, so what I've replied to you is generic.

+1 to what Chscag posted.

In additon, if you do delete anything, generally the best place to start is the Download folder.

EDIT: Also, since you said you were new. If you haven't emptied the Trash, you haven't gained back any disk space by deleting files.

davidpiano said:

I have two Library folders. One with over 50G and one with 4 Gig and I don't know why or what I can or cannot do with them.

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You don't mention your OS version. I have three Library folders in Leopard. Don't mess with them! The advice above is on the mark: hardware that matches your needs.

You could always try monolingual - it frees up space by removing localization files.

Zeke_D said:

You could always try monolingual - it frees up space by removing localization files.

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Don't use Monolingual - it causes more problems that it's worth. If you look at their FAQ page, they answer "questions" about why certain things don't work after using it which should speak volumes. I can attest to the problems with Office 2008 listed in the FAQ - I had to reinstall it just to update it.

Zeke_D said:

You could always try monolingual - it frees up space by removing localization files.

Click to expand...

Be careful using Monolingual. It disables the automatic updates in some applications, most notably Microsoft Office which requires all languages to be installed. Some Adobe applications are the same.

I agree with all the advice, but once you've familiarized yourself, you could use Download DiskWave for Mac - Determine where most of your hard drive space is consumed. MacUpdate.com (free -used to be WhichSize), there are also online storage or get an external HD which would be good to have for Time Machine if you use Monolingual and find that progs stop working on you (then you could go back to your previous backup )

Where are you seeing 'post a poll'?

at bottom of additional options in start a thread is a box "post a poll". ??

Anyway, thanks for all the advice for all who took the time.
I have an external HD and my internal is 250Gig.
I have LOGIC installed which takes around 40gig and about 30gig music and movies.
Can't figure out where all the space went.
I've never touched LIBRARY and wondered if 50gig is normal for that.
Also if it's normal to have another LIBRARY with 4 gig???
Again, I've never touched it BUT I bought this mac pro used.
Should i condense it all to one library? or just leave it alone?

You can run Onyx automation and turn everything on which will generally save space if you never ran it before. Monolingual has worked for me so far and would save space too but be wary b/c others have had problems. You can also delete unnecessary printer drivers (they take about 2-3GB of space). There are really alot of things that eat space. The library folder contains important things so don't run amuck deleting stuff there unless you know what it is. You can also try moving your iTunes library to an external drive. Here's a link on how to do that if you decide to make more room that way. Transferring your iTunes Library | iLounge Article

davidpiano said:

at bottom of additional options in start a thread is a box "post a poll". ??

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I knew I'd seen that somewhere.. just couldn't remember where... I've never used it, but you could post a poll with your post. For example: Community Polls - Page 3 - Mac-Forums.com (chose this page cause it had the most variety)

Yes, you are suppose to have two Library folders. Do not touch anything to do with either one of those folders unless you know what you are doing. There are actually at least 3 Library folders. I would suggest you quit looking at the Library folders and start looking elsewhere for data that can be deleted or moved to another drive.

Of the two Library folders you're probably looking at, one of them contains primarily all the system related stuff for all the applications on your machine - including the much of the stuff that enables the OS to work.

The one inside your users home folder contains primarily all of the individual user account stuff like the preference settings for all of your apps, email, browser bookmarks and much more.

No, don't combine them, don't touch them, stay out of both of them - or your next thread will be: "I don't know what happened. My Mac was working just fine. I shut it down. And now when I restart it all I get is a circle with a / thru it and it won't boot up. What do i do?"

If you only have 3GB of free space left on your internal hard drive - quite frankly, it's well past time for you to upgrade to a larger drive if you don't have a significant amount your own personal data of downloads, documents, music, video, etc. in your home folder that you are willing to delete. Or maybe that 20GB folder of WoW.

Actually, I have 3 Library folders in Leopard, with only one User account.

toMACsh said:

Actually, I have 3 Library folders in Leopard, with only one User account.

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That's not "normal" - there should be the system one and the user one. Where are they located? It sounds as if the third one was created by an application.

I've been using the utility Clean My Mac, and it seems to do a nice job with file clean-up.

vansmith said:

That's not "normal" - there should be the system one and the user one. Where are they located? It sounds as if the third one was created by an application.

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Well, your labels could be misleading...
One in MyUser folder
One in the root HD folder
One in the System folder in the HD folder

I think that is normal.

Me personally, I had 15 GB of pictures, 22 GB of pdf documents (work and college), 28 Gb of movies and 107 GB of music and samples on an internal 250 GB HD. I ended up purchasing/installing another internal 500GB HD along with a 1 TB FW 800 HD for my music, movies and pictures.
Life is good now!

toMACsh said:

Well, your labels could be misleading...
One in MyUser folder
One in the root HD folder
One in the System folder in the HD folder

I think that is normal.

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Ah yes, I had forgotten about the one in /System - my bad. Good catch.