Clean Up Your Mac's Hard Drive for Free

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I just found a great shareware tool called Daisy Disk that graphically shows the contents of your hard drive. It gives you a great visual map of what's on your drive and makes it easy to drill down and clean up files. The best news? It's currently free as part of the MacHeist promotion. Visit their site and solve the puzle (look at the top banner for a clue). Then tweet your results and you get the software for free.



For example... I saved over 1.5 GB of space in just a few minutes.

  1. I used it to identify some HUGE template files for Apple Motion on my internal drive.
  2. I then opened up the files with QuickTime Pro. They were Photo-JPEG and Animation codec files (both beefy).
  3. I converted the Photo JPEG to Apple ProRes 422 and the Animtion to Apple ProRes 444.
  4. Voila.. space saved.




I am currently on a seek and destroy mission to locate large downloads and forgotten files. If you are a little weary, back up your drive before you start the purge in case you trash a needed file.