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Spring Cleaning Your Mac Article 4 Youre a Space Hog Admit It and deal with it I�ve gone through a lot of technical advice in the preceding three Spring Cleaning articles. Now it�s time for some heart-to-heart conversation. Some of us, such as myself, love to collect stuff. We find it hard to get rid of old stuff that we might need some day. That day may be in 2040. So here are some more tips on cleaning your physical and digital �stuff�. � 1. Go back to the article I referenced on �How to DeClutter Like a Boss� Read it. Learn it. Live it. 2. With regard to people who just can�t help stuffing their computers with stuff, I offer this advice: If you want to copy your digital voice recorder to your computer and take up another gigabyte, stop it. Learn how to copy data to an external hard drive.� If you want to install the newest version of Microsoft Office, check to see that you don�t have the last 3 version of Office on your computer.� I�m talking about the installation file you download...

Spring Cleaning Your Mac Article 1 What Happened to My Hard Drive It�s springtime in the San Fernando Valley! Time for spring cleaning! As you work your way through bulging closets, drawers, file cabinets, attics, garages, the backseats of the minivan and under the bed and sofa; why not give a thought to your Mac�s hard drive? You can fill it up with garbage, too. In fact, you can fill it up so much your Mac groans as it labors to work for you. Now how can that be? When you purchased your Mac, you thought its hard drive would serve as a bottomless pit into which you could throw everything digital and NEVER RUN OUT OF SPACE. After all, what could possibly fill up a terabyte or two of storage space? Let us think of this using your home as a metaphor. It�s Saturday morning, you�re out for a walk or drive. You spot a garage sale. They have interesting stuff. You stop to look. You see more interesting stuff. Soon, you�ve got a lamp, a table, a bunch of CDs from your favorite �70s rock band,...

Spring Cleaning Your Mac Article 3 Moving It off the hard drive without causing more problems Now that you�ve identified your space hogs, what do you do with them? I suggest these steps: � 1. Copy them over to an external hard drive so that you don�t accidentally delete one you really wanted. 2. Decide which files and apps you don�t want on your boot drive. 3. Delete them with care, using the correct procedures. Think Before Hitting the Delete Key! 4. If you do not want to delete them, decide where to archive them for future reference.� 5. Remember, your goal is to ensure you have at least 20% of your hard drive free for the use of OS X itself.� � Copying Files to an External Hard Drive and the Choices it involves� You have three choices for copying files over to an external hard drive: 1. The easy way. Just clone the fat hard drive to a bigger external hard drive. You can use at least two different utility programs for this� 2. Picking and choosing which files and folders to copy over...

Spring Cleaning Your Mac Article 2 Whats on My Hard Drive that takes up so much freaking space ! You need to know what obstacles you face in clearing away the digital underbrush. Do you face a lot of small files that just built up over time? Do you face big files that you need, but can�t afford to keep on your hard drive.� I say �hard drive� as though everyone has a cheap 1 TB hard drive in their Mac. I know a lot of Mac users have started moving to Solid State Drives, which right now costs considerably more than the equivalent hard drive. The prices will continue to come down, but right now, you need to manage your SSD space carefully. So I offer choices of apps to measure what files you have on your storage device. I like OmniDiskSweeper in particular, but that doesn�t have to serve as your app. The app that works best for you is the best app for you to choose.� � Here are the choices: � 1. OmniDiskSweeper by the Omnigroup. This is a freeware offering from the Omnigroup. They make gr...