photo credit: F.S.M.

One of the most exciting aspects of upgrading to a new hard drive is the opportunity for increased disk space. Just like an empty closet it is easy to fill up the new drive with larger files. Wes Fryer recently shared something that he had discovered while using a free piece of software called “Disk Inventory X”…

Solving a Macbook hard drive free space mystery » Moving at the Speed of Creativity

“My wife’s MacBook has mysteriously almost run out of free hard drive space, and I wasn’t sure why. The amazing and always-knowledgable Patsy Lanclos told me at least a year ago about the free application Disk Inventory X, which permits users to visually explore the contents of a hard drive running or attached to a computer running the Macintosh OS X operating system.

Using Disk Inventory X tonight, I learned my wife’s Macbook had several large (more than 1 GB) ‘swap files’ saved on it which had apparently been created when someone in our family used the computer until the battery was out of juice. I think this is what creates these LARGE swap files. (Some were named ‘sleepimage.’) Anyway, I was able to identify and delete those files tonight.”

(Via Speed of Creativity)

Wes continued to share how he located other large files that he was able to remove.

My test…

I wanted to see if I would find the same “swap files” and I did discover that I had a large file named “sleepimage”. The specific file was 4 GB. After looking around online I found that the size of the sleepimage file depends on the amount of RAM (memory) your computer has. I currently have 4 GB of RAM on this computer. It makes sense that the sleepimage would be the same size. I also found out some more information regarding the sleepimage…

macosxhints.com – 10.4: Disable Safe Sleep for faster sleep on lid close

“Newer portable Macs use safe sleep (hibernation) in combination with normal sleep (older computers can use this, too). What happens is that when you put your computer to sleep, the system writes the contents of RAM into the file /private var vm sleepimage, then goes into normal sleep mode. If your system loses power completely, it can recover the contents of RAM from this sleepimage file.

The problem with this is putting your computer to sleep can take a while (20 seconds to one minute or more), depending on how much data you currently have loaded in RAM. Also, this sleepimage file is the same size of your total RAM, wasting valuable hard drive space. I have 2GB of RAM, so my file is 2GB.”

(Via MacOSXHints)

I wonder if the sleepimage file is holding the contents from previous power losses, or is a space holder for future power losses?

What now?

I plan on leaving the “sleepimage” as it is. If it is related to how my computer saves information when my computer goes to sleep then maybe I should leave it be. I have had power losses before where I have been able to recover the contents of my session from RAM and it would be horrible to be in the middle of a project and lose information because I turned off/disabled safe sleep mode.

Cleaning did commence though because I found a some applications and files (like Wes) that were taking up a significant amount of space. I deleted the files using “Disk Inventory X” and the programs with another great application called “App Cleaner“.

Free Options: “Disk Inventory X” and “OmniDiskSweeper”

Below is information about “Disk Inventory X” and another piece of free software from The Omni Group called “OmniDiskSweeper”…

Disk Inventory X

“Disk Inventory X is a disk usage utility for Mac OS X 10.3 (and later). It shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called ‘treemaps’.

If you’ve ever wondered where all your disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X will help you to answer this question. “

(Via Derlien.com.)

edu.Mac.nation Opinion: The visual display of files is fantastic!

The Omni Group – OmniDiskSweeper

“When you start OmniDiskSweeper, it presents you with a list of disks attached to your machine. Double-click on one, and a new window opens with a ‘column’ view listing every folder and file you can access, which it sorts by size as you watch.

You then simply browse through the folders and files and delete the large ones which you are no longer using. If a file is part of the system, it’ll say so on the panel (in the list of Packages the file belongs to), so you won’t accidentally get rid of something that would make your system stop working. The free space on the disk and the ordering of the folders are automatically recalculated. If you aren’t sure what’s in a file, you can open it by double-clicking on its icon or dragging its icon onto another application. It’s that easy!”

(Via The Omni Group.)

edu.Mac.nation Opinion: I recently downloaded this and still have to play a little more to see how it compares to “Disk Inventory X.”

Questions

Have you tried either of these applications?

What typically takes up the most space on your hard drive?

My iPhoto Library is getting BIG! Lots of family pictures and videos…

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