4 Top Tips for Saving More Space from Your Mac Hard Drive

For most of the past decade, many people had more drive space than they knew what to do with. Hard drives got bigger and bigger while prices went lower and lower. So it probably comes as a surprise, as you prepare for spring cleaning, to realize your drive may be getting full. The popularity of digital media means that many people are storing huge video files and thousands of photos and music tracks. Just as significantly, a growing number of computers are using solid-state drives (SSDs), which, while speedy, offer considerably less capacity than traditional hard drives. Even a modest iTunes or iPhoto library can quickly fill up a MacBook Air’s 64GB or 128GB SSD, leaving little room for anything else.

So how can you give your data some breathing room? Here are some tips I use to slim down our own drives.

1. Clear out Your Downloads

Every time you view a photo or open a PDF in an email message in Apple's Mail, that file gets saved in a folder called Mail Downloads. If you don’t receive many attachments, this folder will remain relatively small, but if you’re a frequent file exchanger, it can quickly siphon away hundreds of megabytes from your drive—much of it for files you’ve likely already saved somewhere else. Thankfully, emptying this folder is easy once you know where it is. In the Finder, choose Go -> Go To Folder, and then paste or type ~/Library/Mail Downloads—select everything in the folder that appears, and then move the lot to the Trash.

Along those same lines, chances are you’ve got a bunch of stuff downloaded from the Web that you no longer need. These files are stored in your main Downloads folder, which is a little bit easier to find—it’s sitting directly in your home folder, so you can just open it and start cleaning. Unlike with the Mail Downloads folder, however, you probably haven’t saved your Web downloads elsewhere, so it’s good to give them a good once-over to make sure you aren’t deleting something you might need later.

2. Delete Unused Video Versions

Whenever you purchase the high-definition (HD) version of a movie or TV show from the iTunes Store, iTunes downloads two versions of that title: the HD version and the standard-definition (SD) version—the latter for playing on devices that don’t support HD video. (As of March 2012, whether the HD version's resolution is 720p or 1080p depends on your iTunes settings and whether or not the video is available in 1080p.) This means that downloading the two-hour Hugo, for example, uses up a whopping 6GB to 7GB of drive space: roughly 1.9GB for the SD version and another 4.3GB or 5.2GB for the HD version (720p or 1080p, respectively). Similarly, even if you opt for the 720p versions of TV shows, a 45-minute episode requires around 2.2GB of space: roughly 1.5GB for the 720p HD version and 650MB for the SD version.

Deleting the standard-definition version of Hugo will free up nearly 1.9 GB of space; deleting the HD version will free up 4.3GB (for 720p) or 5.2GB (for 1080p).If, like me, you rarely watch both versions of a video, you can cut down the size of your iTunes library—perhaps dramatically—by deleting the version of each, HD or SD, that you don’t need.

3. Selectively Sync Dropbox

You can use the free Dropbox service to keep documents and data synchronized between your Macs. You may have even ponied up for a Dropbox upgrade to increase your storage from the 2.0 GB you get with a free account. If you don’t need all of your Dropbox-synced files with you, however, you’re wasting space on your drive—not to mention battery life if Dropbox is syncing changes to unnecessary files while you’re working on the road.

To exclude particular files from syncing with your laptop, click the Dropbox icon in the menu bar and choose Preferences. In the resulting window, click Advanced, and then click Change Settings next to Selective Sync. You’ll see a column-view file browser displaying the contents of your Dropbox folder. Uncheck a top-level folder to stop syncing that entire folder, or click a folder name to view that folder’s contents—you can disable syncing for just particular sub-folders. Click Update, and Dropbox will ask you to confirm that you want to stop syncing unchecked folders to this particular computer (which will remove them from this computer, though not from Dropbox’s servers or your other computers).

4. Use Network Storage

One of the best ways to free up room on your computer is to refrain from storing unneeded files on it. You can do this with the help of network-attached-storage (NAS) devices. Such devices are generally connected to your network via an ethernet cable, although a few can connect via Wi-Fi. If you’re connected to your network via Wi-Fi, your computer’s Wi-Fi connection will determine overall performance. You can get NAS-like features from a dedicated NAS drive, a USB hard drive that you’ve attached to an AirPort Extreme Base Station or a Time Capsule, or a gadget such as those from Pogoplug, which accommodate multipleUSB storage devices and let you access them on a local network as well as via the Internet.