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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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 I second the Disk Inventory...Submitted by Zvi (not verified) on September 26, 2005 - 11:00am.
I second the Disk Inventory X comment. It's a great way to visualize what types of files and which specific files are taking up large chunks of disk real-estate. For an even more interesting view of your drive, take a look at JDiskReport. It gives you a very nice heirarchical breakdown of large folders. » POSTED IN:
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