Our (old) MacBook 13inch 2008 is full. We’ve removed everything we can (photo’s onto removable drive for instance) and remain with MS Office for Mac and all the standard Mac software (Keynote, Pages, Calendar etc) however our 250GB HDD is full. Its running OS X Yosemite 10.10.5. and we constantly get the message “your startup disk is full”.

It takes an age – about 12 minutes – to boot up.

Are we at the end of the life of the machine or is there something we can do to free up space / extend it?

Where are you running your time machine backups to ?

I’m not, its not been setup.

is your trash empty?

Yep!

You say the 250gb hard drive is full. Theres your problem. Take stuff off that.

You could install a programme like Daisy Disk that breaks down disk usage. Disk Doctor is good for freeing up space.

you must have stuff somewhere then, os x will probably only take up about 10gb or so. Probably check your applications folder to see ho big that is too. Keep searching through to see where all your files are, there must be stuff somewhere.

iolo – Member
You say the 250gb hard drive is full. Theres your problem. Take stuff off that.

Like I said, there’s nothing on it except for the OS, Mac apps and Office fro Mac. I could take them off yes, but it’d be a Mac with no software, so whats the point? Hence I’m wondering if we are done with it and the OS just consumes too much space to be make it realistically usable.

Might be related, but I have a few USB sticks which OSX (10.11.2) thinks are 16GB, when they’re only 2GB in reality…

Anyway, use Disk Utility to check for problems

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201639

get JDiskReport it’ll quickly tell you what’s using the space.

You say the photos are on an external drive so I guess your Photos library/aperture library/iPhoto library/Lightroom library is also on that drive. If not then you’ll likely have some strays on your startup disk.

iTunes files?

Video files in iMovie?

massive powerpoint files?

By the way, how did you ‘remove’ your photos from the mac to the external drive?

Use the terminal: http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/20/command-line-disk-usage-utilities-df-and-du/

df – disk free

du – disk usage

I had exactly this problem once, I had a back up bootable drive, rebooted the machine from the remote hd, re formatted and re installed the software, yosemite is pants unless you have at least 8 gig ram and even then it is dog slow compared to mavericks.

So if you don’t have one, get a cheap HD and set it up as a bootable drive, I think I managed it one time using carbon copy cloner, but given your drive is ****, I wouldn’t reccommend that.

Well, it only has 4GB ram.

In the interim I’ve found 5GB of kids videos (Frizen for example), I’ll check with Mrs K before deleting those. More telling is iPhoto Library and Photo Library are 40GB each!

With no photo’s on the LT can’t I just delete those? I opened Photo library and there are 3 generic images inside, not the family photos.

edit: and there we go, gigs and gigs of kids apps managed via iTunes onto our various phones & iPads…

@Kryton57

I’m on a 2010 MBP, which I think has a very similar CPU to the 2008. I can *highly* recommend bumping up the RAM to 2x4GB, and if budget allows, an SSD.

Plenty of life left in the old dog yet!

I may well do xlphon.

In the meantime I’ve freed up 53GB. There’s still 197GB on there, with 57GB of iTunes music, 9GB of apps, and 32GB of iPhone/ipad apps in iTunes, and 15MB of documents & downloads that still leaves 100GB of “stuff” I can’t find.

It restarted in 3 mins also – whoop!

I don’t know if you’ve ever used a terminal, but if you’re willing to do a little bit of typing it should be easy enough to find that 100GB:

1. Open the terminal

2. Move to the root directory:

cd /

3. Find which of the directories is the biggest:

du -sh *

(This will show a list of directories with the size next to it)

4. “Move” into the biggest directory, for example if it’s /home:

cd home

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you’ve found the culprit(s).

There are quicker ways of doing this, but I’m on linux and I’m not sure if the tools you need are installed by default on MacOS.

Have you tried a clean install?

The iPhoto library and Photos library don’t both occupy 40GB. When you upgraded to Photos it effectively took control of your iPhoto library.

getting started with Photos has some helpful tips e.g. using a smaller local library and having a larger, external library. Or you could use iCloud photo library. Or even copy all your photos to Flickr for free to make sure you lose none, ever.

Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries

You’ll want to resolve your storage problems before trying anything dramatic.

mogrim, du sh* didn’t work.

I’ve obviously fallen way behind in technology, and need to move to the Cloud, which I use for all my mobile/tablet stuff.

To be fair ‘parrot with my limited time I don’t read that kind of stuff, I just buy a device and trust it works. 8)

Just checked my MBP – 1Tb HD
System 6Gb
Library 5Gb
Apps 10Gb.

Users 568Gb

Free space 486Gb. So I would suggest the OS doesn’t take up much space.

There are hidden folders used by Time Machine which store local backup sets if you don’t have an external drive attached. Go to About this mac, More Info, Storage to see if there is any local space being used by backup.

As others have said the OS and MS Office take up very little space.

Do you use the Mail app and have lots of old emails and attachments ?
Photos – hard to say from your posts but uts possible you have multiple copies of each photo, this is possible if you’ve imported them to the computer and then added them to iPhoto

More storage is cheap, £75-ish for 1tb hard drive running at 7200rpm (stock disks run at 5400). Yes SSD is super quick but 500GB+ is fairly costly. I switched the disk is my Mini pretty easily although you do need a bit of IT skill to manage the switch over. FYI you can buy a single 8GB RAM chip and switch one of yours out giving you 10GB – this will cost about £50.

Sounds like you might have hidden files lurking in the background. I’ve had this problem before. Simple things like cheking for iPhone/ iPad back ups and deleting them all bar the last (they are about 5GB each). Email accounts can get huge.
Multiple copies on photos and multiple copies of music files can eat space too.

As other have said get a disc tool to see in more depth what’s on there. A quick thing would be to use Finder and do an advance search for files bigger than 1GB, then 500mb. That sould find some junk.

It’s not dead. 250GB is not alot these days. My 2008 Macbook is going strong running the latest version of El Capitan, takes about 50 seconds to boot up and about 10 seconds to shut down. It went a bit wobbly after the last El Capitan update but seems to have sorted itself out.

I suspect all you need to do is what I did when it started to run really slowly and take ages to boot up and shut down – replace the HDD. SSD would be ideal, but pricy, so I went for a hybrid HDD – 1TB conventional HDD and 8GB SSD. Since I installed this drive it has run like new and feels like it has plenty of life left in it (probably tempting fate with a catastrophic mother board failure now or something!).

Mechanics HDD’s don’t last forever and 7 years is probably a good innings, so it’s probably on its last legs. I see this on the laptops we have at work – the boot up performance starts to slow right down and after a few months the HDD packs up.

250GB might not be a large drive by modern standards but it’s still as much as Apple ship the 11″ Macbook Air with in it’s highest spec.

http://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air

You can buy a 256GB SSD for a little over £60. It will make a huge difference to performance.

Storage wise something odd is going on though I’m surprised at how my own desktop drive strorage is used – About this Mac reports –
128GB Audio
20GB movies
16Gb Apps
15GB Photos

but theres 283Gb of ‘other’

mmm. That’s odd.

So ‘about my mac’ reports only 15GB of photos but there’s 54GB in my Photos library folder and nearly as much again in iPhoto. And theres a second user account with a lot of photos as well.

*wanders in late to the thread, has a quick read and*

In the interim I’ve found 5GB of kids videos (Frizen for example)

Well, there’s your problem. It’s frozen

*wanders out again with his coat*

that still leaves 100GB of “stuff” I can’t find.

I had a problem with an iMac behaving the same way – it turned out over time a log file had gone weird and gotten massive. I needed to turn on ‘view hidden files’ to see it, but one log had pretty much clogged up a 500gb HD and would re-clog it pretty much as fast as I deleted stuff to make space available

How many user accounts are there on the mac? Log in to them and make sure the trash is empty in all of them. I have a user at work who doesn’t empty his account trash it causes problems.

Have you emptied the separate ‘Trash’ option within iphoto?

Disk Inventory X run it and it’ll give you a complete listing of your HD sorted by largest files/directories, you can then easily drill down it and see what’s taking up the space.

The Macbook air is really intended to be run as a netbook with most of your content accessed via a Cloud type service rather than storing your media and files on the HDD so you can get away with a small HDD. You start using its HDD to store your media then it soon fills up and It is usually accepted that with Macs you ideally need to leave 25% of your HDD free or you will start seeing reduction in performance and speed.

The Macbook air is really intended to be run as a netbook with most of your content accessed via a Cloud type service rather than storing your media and files on the HDD so you can get away with a small HDD.

Sure, but the OP’s complaining he’s got no space left once he’s taken off music and photos.

It’s far from a fair comparison but my 2011 Macbook with 8GB and an SSD takes about 20 seconds to boot. I upgraded the memory and disc at different times – the disc makes much more difference than the memory.

Mine gets used much as the OPs – MS Office, the Apple office apps etc. It’s showing 41GB of Apps. As long as you don’t store a lot of video or music 250GB still goes a long way.

Try going to disk utility and doing a repair on your drive, it may be reporting the free space incorrectly.

mogrim, du sh* didn’t work.

Try this in terminal:

sudo du -sh /*

then put in your password.

Now copy/paste the results, for example my system shows this:

20G /Applications
4.4G /Library
0B /Network
7.0G /System
39G /Users
875G /Volumes
2.5M /bin
0B /cores
4.5K /dev
4.0K /etc
1.0K /home
4.0K /installer.failurerequests
1.0K /net
10G /private
1.0M /sbin
4.0K /tmp
395M /usr
4.0K /var

My system has loads of stuff, full Adobe creative suite, etc.
I have a feeling there may be a load of stuff in the /usr folder

Omni Disksweeper is a beautifully simple program for seeing where your space has gone (and deleting files)

https://www.omnigroup.com/more

The Macbook air is really intended to be run as a netbook with most of your content accessed via a Cloud type service rather than storing your media and files on the HDD so you can get away with a small HDD.

Rubbish! Their primary target was those who needed a browsing/word processing platform with insane battery life and feather weight (think business person who carries their laptop all day, attending meetings). It’s not a Chromebook… or a netbook (which is what you’re referring to)

You start using its HDD to store your media then it soon fills up and It is usually accepted that with Macs you ideally need to leave 25% of your HDD free or you will start seeing reduction in performance and speed.

In the days of mechanical drives, yes there is *some* element of truth in this. With SSD, those days are gone.