Mac Alias Files

[cburk246]

I have been getting that message about the startup disk being almost full, so I have been going through a lot of things and found these aliases for my mac.

Question, can they be deleted and if so will it do anything productive? There are 3--they are all in a folder on my desktop called "desktop junk" where I throw useless things in to clean up my desktop.

 

[MacInWin]

Aliases just point to where the real files/folders are located. You can trash them, but they don't take up much disk space. Better candidates for making space are music, picture, and movie files. Those are large and can be moved to external drives relatively painlessly. Also, you could use Onyx and let it clean out your cache files, log files, etc. One other consumer of hard drive space could be Time Machine, if you let it run and don't have an external drive holding the backups. It creates temporary files on the internal drive until the target drive reappears.

 

[ron4mac]

It will do no harm to delete all 4 of those aliases (items with the little arrow in the lower left corner)

 

[cburk246]

Thanks for the feedback!

 

[harryb2448]

As MacInWin advised removing aliases will achieve nothing. Maybe time to move movies/iTunes to an external hard drive if you need the free space.

 

[IWT]

And here's how to move your iTunes and iPhoto libraries:

iPhoto '11: Move your iPhoto library to a new location

How to move your iTunes Media folder | Macworld

Ian