Saving Space

Definitely awake now...I'd been getting messages regarding space on my Startup disk with increasing frequency, so I ran my old friend WhatSize.

This as their website states

WhatSize is a simple tool that allows the user to quickly measure the size in bytes of a given folder and all subfolders and files within it.

It does, no graphs just a simple ordered list. I pretty much knew what the culprit was - my rather bloated music collection, to be exact it's not music, but the spoken word. The shear number of podcasts was bringing my laptop to it's knees. About 20 gigs of space used on podcasts. I'm a horder I know. I can't afford to hord like that regarding podcasts. Sure I might go back several episodes in dl.tv to try and find the mouse mat they recommended. I might like to enjoy again Kevin Rose referring to his "masturbatory" obsession with Tiki Bar TV star Lala. As the collection grows my memories for these Gems diminishes. If you clicked the last link, you've proved that nothing on the internet is lost forever...

By removing some old episodes of the big players, my video podcasts. dl.tv, diggnation, commandN and Geek Brief TV. I instantly reclaimed over seven gigs of space.



I had a years worth of "This Day in Apple History" I'm never going to listen to them again, out they went. It got harder as I went along though, since with some subscriptions I'm so far behind...


Anyway, with my photo library set to grow I had better get on top of this space issue I have. Burning archives to DVD is probably best since I still reckon that's far more stable than an external hard disk even if I power it down. When archiving stuff off the computer you should take stock and really work out what the likelyhood is of needing something again. Do I really need to keep all the older versions of Parallels desktop - no one is ever gonna ask me to prove how committed I am to the parallels cause, I need the current version I'm using and maybe the last stable release.

Some things it good to keep hold of just in case. iShowYou is some lovely screen capture software. Since it went out of beta it became chargeable. I don't use it enough for me to warrant paying for it, so I keep the Beta on standby. I know I know it's not in the spirit of the game, but seriously I haven't used it in months, so if I paid for it it would be a dead weight, now if it comes up in some mac heist like bundle - it might draw me in, until then - no go.

E-Mails I keep. I've got every e-mail I have received since owning macs, the last 18 months. E-mails going back 5/6 years on my old PC. I will probably never ever read them. That probably made my switch harder as I wanted to take them with me, but couldn't be arsed putting the time in. Now my colleague who recently switch (Yep I got another one) deletes all her e-mails as she is going along well done her, however she's using a web based client so wouldn't have had to do anything, same with my dad. To be honest the mail move isn't a switcher diffculty, I've always had a hard time moving mail accross, such a ball ache.

The mail might go but the account settings and mail rules don't. For someone who has maybe 12 accounts and countless tens of rules this is a pain in the ass. That's why despite some reports on the web I love Apple's migration assistant, worked perfectly for me when I switched to the MBP off the mini.

I know this has reverted back to my old skool rambling blog post style, sorry... you can tell I need more sleep.