mac os x declutter mac after 3 years safely

#Mac os x declutter mac after 3 years safely movie
#Mac os x declutter mac after 3 years safely full
#Mac os x declutter mac after 3 years safely tv
#Mac os x declutter mac after 3 years safely free

The first thing to do, then, is find out how much free space is left on your system drive.

#Mac os x declutter mac after 3 years safely full

Hopefully you'll never reach this point: the time to take action is when your hard drive approaches the 90% full mark, before any warning messages start to appear. Applications won't even be able to launch, while those applications already running may suddenly grind to a halt or begin to quit unexpectedly. Applications routinely 'borrow' tens or even hundreds of megabytes of space when running, and the most resource-intensive applications will start to complain loudly about a lack of drive space, or even refuse to start at all.Įventually you'll reach the final point: there will be little or no disk space left at all. Push things further, and as your free space dips below 100MB you'll find things get even worse. You'll also start to get error messages every time you try to copy large folders to your drive, informing you there's not enough drive space to complete the operation. Your Mac itself will start to tell you the drive is full or almost full, and exhort you to start freeing up space. Certain applications may start to display warning messages, and performance slows even further. The next milestone is reached as the amount of free space drops below 1GB. You're not doing your drive's physical health any favours either since its moving parts have to work harder, increasing drive temperature and ultimately shortening its lifespan. You'll start to notice performance suffer as the drive works harder to read and write files. But for the vast majority with traditional drives (HDDs) which utilise rotating platters and mechanical drive arms, fragmentation is the first tell-tale sign that all is not well. Your Mac needs at least 10% free space on the drive to help it keep files in a neat, contiguous order (a process known as defragmentation).Īs your drive fills up and the defrag process grinds to a halt, your files start to get split up into multiple parts to fit the available space, ending up physically scattered all over your drive.įile fragmentation may not be an issue for newer solid-state drives (SSDs) due to their lack of moving parts and an ability to access any part of the drive almost instantaneously. The first landmark isn't one that will necessarily trigger any alerts, and occurs when your drive nears 90% of its capacity. Having acknowledged that this isn't just a problem for MacBook Air owners with a paltry 64GB of drive space, what are the tell-tale signs that your drive might be starting to reach its limits? It's therefore obvious that even the largest hard drive can quickly become overwhelmed with all those files you've been copying to it.

#Mac os x declutter mac after 3 years safely movie

You might also be surprised to learn how many duplicated files exist on your hard drive - it's bad enough having two or three copies of a file, but when that file is a 10GB movie you can quickly see how it is that the hard drive that looked virtually bottomless a few months ago is suddenly full to the brim.

#Mac os x declutter mac after 3 years safely tv

It doesn't end there either: your iTunes library can consume more than its fair share of space, what with your music collection, podcasts, movies and TV shows to handle. The average one hour HDV tape holds 13GB of data, so it doesn't take long to gobble up hundreds of gigabytes with your original footage, never mind the final edited movie. It's even worse when you look at all the camcorder footage you've got stashed away. That equates to anything from 400MB to 1.5GB for every 100 photos on your hard drive. Today's high resolutions come at a price - every 10-megapixel photo consumes around 4MB in JPEG format, or up to 15MB in raw format. The biggest drain on your hard drive will, however, be your personal files, and specifically all those photos and videos you've uploaded from your brand spanking new camera and camcorder. All well and good, but yet more gigabytes of precious drive space have gone in the meantime. Again, it's easy to let them just pile up on the off-chance you might need them at some unspecified point. Next, there are all those files you've downloaded from the internet via your browser, or received as email attachments. That can account for a few gigabytes of space easily, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. The likelihood is you've installed a fair few applications, some of which you were trying out and forgot all about during those heady days when you thought that space would last forever. The first thing to understand is how your hard drive has become so full.