I got a rather distressing signal from my computer the other day: I had literally used up all the space on my 500-gig hard drive. Downloads weren’t downloading. Apps were straggling like cobbled horses.
Some quick googling led me to Gemini, a surprisingly effective hard drive-cleaning app. It finds duplicate files on your Mac (Windows-users, try these alternatives), which could be caches, backups or files saved in multiple apps.
I scanned my “Home” folder in Gemini – basically my entire hard drive – and it found an astonishing 50 gigabytes (and counting) of duplicate files I could delete. Video files for some projects I completed years ago, for example, were taking up 92 gigs because iMovie, iTunes and iPhoto had all saved different versions of them.
If you’re like me and you need to give your apps more breathing room, I found some more good cleaning suggestions on this list. One of Dan’s earlier emails covered a tool that finds data-heavy emails taking up storage in your inbox.
Even if you aren’t struggling with a top-heavy hard drive, it may be worth it to do some spring cleaning. Who knows what you’ll find in dusty old directories?
Speaking of directories: if my email on grep last week snagged anybody’s attention, I suggest the Codecademy track on the command line. I just took it for a test run last week, and it covers grep in Part II. Only takes an hour or two!