Where's all the space?

M

Mr_Spencer

Registered
I recently installed Leopard and I'm now backing up and cleaning my Mac before starting time machine. My 'Previous Systems' folder says it contains 12.9gb, but within it is one folder, '2008-02-15_0307', which contains 1.3gb. In turn this contains 'Private' at 277mb and 'Users' at 8k. Where is the missing space and is it safe just to delete it all if the Mac is running fine?
 
The "Previous System Folder" is a folder that an Archive & Install makes so you can get your old data from. Then you can Trash the rest of the folder. That is the point for having the folder, not to keep it around.
 
Thanks for the prompt reply. I realise why the folder is there, just wondered where the 'invisible' gbs were. Also, deleting it isn't going to interfere in any way with the running of the Mac now, right?
 
No it shouldn't. Once you get the data out that you want, delete the folder and only that folder.

Plus do you regularly backup and run maintenance on your Mac?
 
I regularly repair permissions, and back up to my external and thence to DVD.
I deleted the previous system folder (I'd already taken what I needed) and it made about 2gb of extra space, so I still don't understand why it was saying it was 12gb.
 
As you are running Leopard, there are at least 4-5 GB wasted on all the localizations you aren't using, and the other processor code. Those in addition to the above explanations ^^
You could use something like Delocalizer to get rid of the languages you'll never use, and I think there was some application that also rips off the wrong processor code for you. (if on PPC, no need for intel code)
 
A Mac OS X system has a lot of invisible folders, which can be quite large. Still, 12.9GB seems excessive. Also, "private" is normally an invisible item, so it seems like it's made the invisible ones visible. Hmm.

There are some utilities made specifically for seeing what it taking up the space in a large folder, like OmniDiskSweeper.
 
Thanks for all the help. I'm setting Time Machine running right now so everything's backed up then I'll look into it further. I remember using an app to look at crash logs, etc, sometime back which showed up some big, big text files. I'll look at OmniDiskSweeper later. Thanks again.
 
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