Having found out that my Mac Mini (PowerPC G4 1.42 GHz with 1GB of RAM) can’t run Logic Studio, I have no choice but to run it on my MacBook (2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM). So I needed more hard drive space, and decided to do some spring cleaning on my MacBook.
Trying to find out what’s taking up so much space
After researching a bit, I found a MacWorld article talking about utilities that would help me figure out the files and folders that are taking up space. There was WhatSize and OmniDiskSweeper, which weren’t free. I decided to try out GrandPersepctive, which was free.
Understanding what’s on your hard disk visually with GrandPerspective
GrandPerspective maps out your hard disk visually. It groups the files by folders visually, and files are represented in blocks. The bigger the block, the bigger the file.
It’s a very nifty app and helped me find out what’s taking up a lot of space rather quickly.
What’s going to take up space in the future?
With that I located the big files and folders and got them transferred to an external drive. Planning for the future, I realized the biggest storage eaters will be movie projects and presentation files.
For presentation files, I've decided just to keep all presentation files in one folder so I can always keep an eye on it. So with Spotlight, I pulled up all my Keynote presentation files and moved them to one folder.
One might ask why I didn’t use smart folders. I intended to, but I found out that you can’t sort/filter by size in smart folders. Hope that gets changed in the near future.
Getting iMovie ‘08 to work with external storage
Now for the movies, what I want to do is like iPhoto, where I can have the files on a separate hard drive. I fiddled with iMovie ’08 a bit, but couldn’t figure it out. So I did some research and came across this article from Apple.
According to the article, Event files are what’s taking up space. You want to avoid moving the Event files manually as you would break the connection to existing projects. The article contains a section called Moving Events, which has step-by-step instructions to move Events in iMovie '08.
The hunt for external storage begins
Since I decided to keep movie files and other bigger files on an external drive, I’ll need a new backup solution that can backup my MacBook and the external drive. In particular, I want to avoid clutter on my table as well as additional power cables. Right now, my top candidates are the G-Raid Mini and G-Raid. They're both compact and can be powered by USB / Firewire. The only bad part – it’s not white! Oh well, I’ll shop around, and maybe I’ll come across something that’s good and shiny white.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Mac: Spring cleaning my MacBook + Using iMovie ’08 with an external hard drive
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