Mac Maintenance Sunday: Spelunking for Large File Sizes

In preparation for Lion, I’ve been organizing and pruning my Mac Pro’s boot drive: a 40GB OWC SSD. Space is at a premium on this drive, so I’ve limited it to the OS (Snow Leopard) and my apps. All the data I interact with lives on a separate internal SATA HDD. It’s worked out for me well, so far.

The two screenshots below give a visual picture of all the apps I have currently installed, with some overlap on the second screenshot. Click on each to embiggen.

40GB is not a lot of space. With the help of the excellent WhatSize utility, I have been able to check which files are the largest on my system. I spent an afternoon investigating file sizes and what I’ve found was pretty interesting.

I currently have a little under 20GB sitting in my Applications folder. Some of these apps will be pruned out of my system (via AppZapper) when I install Lion. The largest application size belongs to Autodesk’s Maya, weighing in at 2.03GB.

Oddly enough, one of the largest files on my hard drive belongs to Backblaze, specifically within the Library > BackBlaze folder which weighs in at a ginormous 2.55GB. It’s pretty freaking huge and I’m not sure why. I’m currently investigating options to move the BackBlaze folder to another drive. The second largest file is Adobe, clocking in at 1.55GB. There’s over 314MB contained in a folder called SpeechAnalysisModels, which I’m not sure I’ll ever need. Same for the various Camera Raw profiles. I’m unsure whether or not it’s okay for me to delete these, so I’m leaving them for now.

My user folder takes up a whopping 1.58GB (nearly all of it comes from the Library folder within). The biggest culprits within the Library folder are the Applications Support folder (582MB) and Caches (527MB). Interestingly enough, the largest file inside the Caches folder belongs to com.atebits.tweetie.profile-images, which contains avatar images for everyone I follow on Twitter. Given that I’m using the official Twitter client now (formerly Tweetie), my suspicion is that the com.atebits.tweet.profile-images folder can be safely deleted. (On a side note: is there a Mac program that safely cleans out Application caches?)

Other culprits that took up a lot of space were the folders dubbed iPad Software Update and the iPod Software Update, found in User > Library > iTunes. Both folders took up almost 1GB of space together. I deleted both folders, as I can always re-download the applications should I ever need to restore my iPad and iPod devices.

In the process of doing some routine file size investigation, I’ve reclaimed almost 2GB of space, leaving my SSD with about 9GB free. With that said and done, I only have one thing left to say: Bring on Lion!

-Krishna

Update: I reclaimed an additional 2GB of data using Monolingual to remove the additional language resources that I’ll never use from Mac OSX. It also does a good job of scrubbing away PowerPC code from the Universal binary apps if you’re on an Intel Mac (saving even more space).