Tommy Collison

I connect my phone to the computer, intending to copy over the photos from RENT from the weekend, only to find a pop-up appear in iPhoto.

Pop-ups, both online and offline, are the bane of my computer use. I mean, I don’t want to be interrupted in what I’m doing for anything unimportant, which pop up messages almost universally are.

‘The hard-drive that iPhoto is using is low on disk space. Are you sure you should like to continue?”

I open Finder and look at the bottom of the screen to see just how much (or how little) space I have. 700 MBs. Hmm, doesn’t seem all that little, I think to myself – that’s a decent quality movie, or 2 House M.D. episodes. After tweeting my annoyance at the pop-up however, I find out that in fact, anything under a GB will cause my laptop not to work at optimal levels.

I’d been having hard drive problems for a good while now, and I couldn’t trace them. The only big things on my laptop were my music collection (about 1,500 songs, or 8 GBs) and my photo collection (3,500 pictures, about 6 GBs) – so how come I have less than a GB free? My hard drive is 80 GBs, and I can account for 12 of that from two things – which are the only big things on my laptop, I know that. So where’s the rest of that?

I know that sys files will take up some space, but I’d be damned if they’d take up anywhere near half the HD space, let alone 68 GBs. My only guess was that lots of little things were hidden away in my desktop, library and downloads folders.

Something had to be done, I decided. I thought about restoring my laptop to factory defaults after backing up my merge 80 GBs onto Dad’s behemoth of a 320 GB external USB drive – but that would have required the Snow Leopard original install disks, and those CDs are kind of hard to come by in our house – along with various cables and such. And so, after some googling, I found out of a second solution which did much the same thing:

- Create a new user account
- Give it admin privileges, demote the old (to be deleted) account to ‘limited user’
- Delete the old account without saving the home folder.

And that’s what I did. The back up of the original “Tommy Collison” account took about an hour; during which time I ate dinner and did homework. Maybe it was my laptop on its last legs, but the process to delete “Tommy Collison” after creating the second account “Trust Tommy” took longer than expected because System Preferences crashed (colloquially known as “beach balling”) numerous times. After forcing a restart, the system gave way and let me delete myself.

After that, I logged into my new account – Trust Tommy. 26 GBs free, which jumped to 35 after I deleted the save of the Home folder that Mac OSX had made.

So, I’d effectively wiped everything off my laptop – save for the Applications folder. I also saved App Support and Prefs from the /Library folder. At 6 GBs in total, I deemed that a small price to pay to save those – it meant that everything else was just how I liked it

I left Dad’s hard drive copying back over stuff I needed overnight. Desktop and Downloads were known black spots for things getting stuck and then bloating the folders and the hard drives, so they were left untouched. Music, Pictures, App Settings and Prefs were the only things I felt I needed.

This morning, I looked at how much space I’d saved from nuking my own computer for the greater good. 5 GBs free.

Hang on – I didn’t do all that for 4.3 GBs. I looked at Music to make sure everything was in once. Music/iTunes/Library contained all the different artists – no problem there. However, /iTunes/Untitled also contained all my artists. I made untitled the last time I changed laptops and couldn’t save my music. It contained the contents of my iPhone’s music library copied back over onto a computer. And now my music was on my new account twice. I deleted Untitled, freeing up 8 GBs of space immediately. I went into iTunes and double checked that I could still play all my music, which I could, proving that /Untitled had been a duplicate.

And so, 12 GBs were free on my laptop. Much better.

Resetting up applications didn’t take long; Apps like NetNewsWire (RSS reader), EchoFon (desktop Twitter client) and Chax (iChat hack so as to allow MSN addresses) needed were just a quick login, while Chrome could be reconfigured easily by just importing the file of all my bookmarks, history and such. Mail.app was also very easy to set up.

From usage so far, all I can see that I’ve lost (which I knew before that I would lose) is song play counts. That’s where Last.FMcomes in – my play counts are now stored online and not on one machine, just for such an occasion as this.

Speaking of which, whenever I tried to use Last.FM on my old computer, it’d crash, forcing me to use the older (OS9) classic version. Now, I’m able to use the new version, which, critically, supports iPod scrobbling.

So, how do you solve a problem like no hard-drive space? Back it up, nuke it and start afresh.