Locating space wasters

The most efficient way to free up disk space is to delete some large files and folders that you no longer need.

Look at the disk map and try to locate markedly large folders. Then drill down and find out what actually takes so much disk space.

Here are some suggestions:

• Check if there are movies (~/Movies) or music/podcasts (~/Music/iTunes) that you no longer need. Use iTunes to delete the files linked to your iTunes library, so you wouldn’t need to update the library manually.
• ~/Downloads and torrents folders often take tens of gigabytes and contain lots of large files you have probably forgotten about.
• Virtual machines like Parallels or VMWare Fusion may take lots of disk space, whereas you may no longer be using them.
• Some applications leave huge cache files in ~/Library/Application Support, but be careful with removing files from this folder and make sure you know what you are doing.

After you locate a candidate for deletion, make sure you no longer need it, and then actually delete it.