Spring Cleaning Your Mac

Some of you may have handled this nicely with your Tiger installation, backing up everything and then blowing away your hard drive with a fresh, clean install. For those of you, like me, who didn't do the clean install, you might be looking to free up some hard drive space. It's time to do some spring cleaning of your Mac.

After my problems with setting up a DVD burn yesterday, I remembered (with some nudging from our readers) the beauty of burn folders. I went through my Home folder with a fine-tooth comb, having the contents of each folder displayed in list format by date modified, and every file that has gone ignored for longer than a month I threw over in a burn folder. I then chose "Get Info..." on the Burn Folder, expanded the Burning information pane and clicked on the Calculate button every so often to make sure I wasn't going over the 4.7GBs of space available per DVD-R disk. Every time I approached that ceiling, I created a new burn folder and continued the process.

I then went through my Applications folder and got rid of all the programs I never use. For each one I removed, I did a Spotlight search for its name and the name of the software manufacturer. This turned up all the files associated with the program that were embedded in different spots across my Library folder. Drag to Trash. Empty Trash. Rinse. Repeat.

I ended up with 4 DVDs and one CD of files that were just sitting there taking up space and going unused. My hard drive now has 28GBs of free space rather than only about 8. I'm pretty content with these results and I'd say it was a nice digital cleaning session. What spring cleaning practices do you use on your Macs?