Hard Drive House Cleaning

MacBook Pro Hard Drives

I am a sloppy curator of my hard drive.  The MacBook Pro is only a year old, and I went from 100 GB to 240. So I was surprised to see it was 90% full.  I thought I would fix that. But oh the tangled web we weave when first we start messin with digital files.

What I chose to do was a result of a lot of introspection and guessing. It OS not a recommendation. I began with research. Lots of it over days. What I learned was not as helpful as I hoped. I learned that either you should, or should not, benefit from reformatting and reinstalling OS-X. Okay. The best information and guidance came from <a href="http://minimalmac.com/" target="_blank">MinimalMac</a>.  Patrick Rhone  is helpful and accessible. His blog is a thing of beauty, minimalist, clean and effective, like his message. Armed with such moral support, I resolved to move ahead.  It became a journey in self discovery as well as bits and bytes.  Read on...




After logging the most helpful webpages on Instapaper and studying them, I dug out my back up drive. And began to clean it up. Too many versions of various back-up software and too much drag and drop copying. I deleted the junk. The idea was to use this drive as an Apple Time Machine drive. But not enough room was available, and since I wanted to keep a couple of versions of apps and files, I needed a plan B.

Thinking about another hard drive made my head ache, so I rationalized that I could use a tiny remote drive to augment my hard drive or a future MBA hard drive with a tiny <a href="http://store.apple.com/us/product/H0767ZM/A?mco=MTY3ODQ5OTY">Passport by Western Digital</a>. This would work. Bi bought the drive while at an Apple store, wanting to shore up Apple's profits for the year.  Step B1 complete.

On to step B2. Reformat the Passport to the Apple GUIS format, and delete the Western Digital bloatware. It was now Step B3, Time Machine backup. This could not be easier. Open the Time Machine app with the new hard drive plugged in, and tell it to use the Passport, click go and wait. A few hours later, I had a perfect backup that would be just as easy to restore, and now I could continually backup.

So I was ready now for step B4. Aggressive cleaning my MBP hard drive. There are so many ways to do this. First was to look at the content. I chose Daisy Drive to do this, after trying other utilities. This one is best, by a whisker. I had arrived at<a href="http://daisydisk.en.softonic.com/mac"> Daisy Disk</a> while cleaning the remote hard drive that is now a tertiary drive. On my MBP the biggest files were movies, so I dumped some on<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/"> DropBox</a> so Mrs. Exechobo could copy them. Others I deleted after making sure I had the masters on our dedicated movie drive. Next I attacked the music files. I resolved to delete em all (again, the music master drive holds the originals), and reload music I actually listen to. Same with the photos. Back em up and delete em all. Aperture, I am told, let's me work from multiple file directories, so I can easily go from a big repository of all photos to a smaller on-board the MBP directory of current pictures.  Neat.  We will tackle that soon.

Once the hard drive was cleaned up, I had reclaimed about 110 GB, leaving 90 on the MBP.  This worked for a couple of days.  Then I started thinking, why not go all the way?  My MBP speed had not improved, so why not go all the way?

More research did little to confirm that this was a bad idea.  And I had a full, current back up, so what the hell?  I slid in my OSX disk, held the C key and rebooted.  Open Disk Utilities, select erase disk, and BAM, it occurred before I could worry about it.  Done, empty hard drive with a new name.  Pristine!  Step B5 accomplished.

Now to see what I could do with it.  Step B6.  Of course I had to do all the updating the year old OSX required, along with iTunes.  That was a two hour wait fest on my slowest DSL speed there is, fastest available out here, internet.

Step B7 was to load up the apps I know I need.  Lets start with Microsoft Office.  Drag and drop.  So easy, and it worked.  A couple other apps, and then some details.  Like addresses.  And with that, the first use of Time Machine, and its first glitch.  The advanced Snow Leopard won't let you just open address book and go back to the last good version.  You have to go into the backup, find your addresses in the user/library/application support/address book folder, select all, and right click, then select restore. Not simple, but happily effective.  I used a similar process for restoring my Safari Extensions.  Other back up restorations went well, and impressed me with how good Time Machine is.

Key test time, step B8, syncing my iPhone with the new computer.  Amazing, it all went without a hitch.  I had anticipated the music library, making the changes I wanted to see, had ensured my address book was squared away, had re-downloaded and checked my ringtones and Podcasts.  This all went without a hitch, and the sync installed all my bookmarks back to Safari.  The calendar did't work, it kept my Google calendar synced items on the iPhone, but didn't transfer them to the MBP, and I lost other future events.  The process for getting a backup from Time Machine is arcane and Byzantine.  First disappointment, but I simply re subscribed to Google Calendar and manually re-entered what was missing.

The result is that my hard drive now has no photos yet, and only about 23 GB occupied.  More important, the speed of my MBP has picked back up to what it was when new.  So my conclusion, the clean reinstall is a good idea once in a while.  And the Apple process is thorough, effective and self contained.  And I had a lot of apps and stuff that I won't miss.