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Tiger's Spotlight: Smart Folders to monitor for large files
Merlin Mann | Sep 26 2005
As my media collection grows and my downloads get larger and more frequent, my poor PowerBook is almost always this close to being completely full. Having an overstuffed drive can hammer your performance as well as take you off-task (“You Startup Disk is almost full…”), so regular deletion of crufty files is a part of most folks' regular Mac maintenance. Although OmniDiskSweeper is my favorite way to exhaustively comb a drive for fat-assed files, it can be time-consuming on a large drive. So I often do a surgical strike with a few simple Spotlight Smart Folders to identify the most likely candidates for fast deletion. A few very basic suggestions:
I prefer these searches to simply sorting a folder by Of course the applications of this are endless, but the basic idea stays the same: make it easy to monitor the locations where large files tend to accumulate. For example, you could also make a Smart Folder to watch your work files for large-item projects you can archive or delete:
Tiger has been out for several months now. Have you found novel ways to make Spotlight part of your workflow? 8 Comments
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Disk Inventory X is a... by EHD (not verified)
I second the Disk Inventory... by Zvi (not verified)
Frankly, the way Spotlight has... by brian w (not verified)
I've found WhatSize to be... by Dean Thompson (not verified)
does anyone know of any... by sarah (not verified)
Err, how is this hint... by ssp (not verified)
I do not use spotlight... by Mortimer (not verified)
About Merlin Bio Merlin Mann is an independent writer, speaker, and broadcaster. He’s best known for being the guy who created the website you’re reading right now. He lives in San Francisco, does lots of public speaking, and helps make cool things like You Look Nice Today, Back to Work, and Kung Fu Grippe. Also? He’s writing this book, he lives with this face, he suffers from this hair, he answers these questions, and he’s had this life. So far. Merlin’s favorite thing he’s written in the past few years is an essay entitled, “Cranking.”
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