10 July 2020

I NEED SPACE

Until recently, I was having problem with storage space on my MacBook Pro.  It's my newest Mac but it's many years old and the hard drive seemed not to be big enough.  I would delete photos, music files, etc to reclaim a few measly gigabyte then all of a sudden, right in front of my eyes, I would see in a Finder window that available space dropped steadily until there's nothing available.  Sure, those podcasts took up some space and I deleted them, stopped the subscription.  I also moved scanned photos to a 256-GB flash drive.  Yeah, I also deleted cached data in the Safari and Chrome browsers, that sure helped a lot.  I read somewhere that having a few gigabytes available is a dangerous thing to do.  Supposedly, just the sleep file, which is some file that holds all the info for the Mac to seemingly instantly wakes up from sleep mode, is a few gigabytes.  There was so much I can do with my own account's data.  Luckily, I decided to look at the other accounts on the same computer.  Motherlode!  I discovered that in the Downloads folder of the guest account there are some 10-gb files.  Some ISO file and some update to Xcode, the code-writing environment for Mac.  Moved those files to an external hard drive, wham, 20 GB reclaimed!  I also read up on Xcode and as nice as it is, I have no plan to become a Mac programmer, or any kind of programmer.  Yes, I'll whip up some PowerShell script to make my job easier, but nothing that would need Xcode or any integrated development environment.  The app takes up 10 GB of my little laptop, so off it went!  Now my Mac has a whopping, no sarcasm there, 30 GB of free space!  It's just an app, it's perfectly safe to delete.  I did gingerly test all my apps the days after I deleted Xcode.  From what I read, the only time you would need Xcode, outside of being a programmer, is when you download some uncompiled, i.e. not readily usable, open-source piece of software.  To run said software, there may be some script you would need to launch, whereby the script would use Xcode to make the final compiling.  Or something like that.  If you only use commercial software, or ready-to-run open-source software, there's nothing to worry about when you delete Xcode from the Applications folder. 

Not that it's insignificant, but earlier I also found 1 GB of some movie extras.  I rented the movie off iTunes and only saw the movie so that went away but the extras stayed.  I usually don't care about extras materials, especially from a movie I saw so long ago.

In order to see content of other users on the same computer, you would need to give yourself access.  It helps to be an administrator of your own computer.  And know how to grab power!

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