Audacity Forum

I'm somewhat new to this. How do I free up more space on a Mac running Tiger in order to record more stuff. Thanks for any help in advance.

Unlike the Windows people, Mac OS-X is pretty good about self-adjusting and maintenance. You don't have to "defrag" your hard drive to keep it efficient.

I would download and run Mac Janitor. There are ways to do those jobs manually such as from the command line Mac OS Terminal, but this is so much easier.

http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hil ... nitor.html

After that, it's a matter of connecting a nice large, empty, external FireWire hard drive and push your work out of your Mac and onto that. Don't forget to empty out your trash can when you get done deleting stuff. A full trash can takes up a lot of room.


The rule for backups is to have your valuable work on two different spinning platters or storage devices. Internal hard drive and external backup drive, two different hard drives, USB thumb drive and hard drive, something like that. More than two doesn't help and not having a safety backup for your work is begging loudly for trouble.

Koz

Thanks for the help. It worked well.

That "Janitor" thing is interesting.

Because of the UNIX running behind Mac OS-X, a machine is completely self-contained and self-maintaining if you never turn it off. If your machine is running and completely alive (not sleeping) between the hours of 0100 and 0500, you don't need Mac Janitor. All those tasks will happen automatically.

If you read far enough, you find that all these tools are doing is "cleaning up" all the log and diary entries that OS-X keeps. The data is compressed into a much smaller form for long-term storage.

"I walked the dog today."
"I started the network today."
"I went shopping today."
"Somebody connected a FireWire drive a little while ago."

There are a number of those diaries and they get big over time. If you didn't delete any of them, you can go back to what the machine was doing when you first turned it on (first birthday). If you don't clean them, they can get big enough to hinder the running of the machine.

To snap back to Audacity for a minute, you need to be really careful how you save your music work. Always export a finished show as a WAV file and keep that as the archive. Do not try to save a Project. Projects are not single files. They are insanely complicated, multi-file clouds and if you do anything wrong or leave out any of the pieces, your project will crash.

Koz