Maintaining My Mac

Yesterday was maintenance day at Chez Zot. With less than 1.5% of my disk space available, my Powerbook's hard drive was running on borrowed time. I have been strict about what gets onto it for a long time -- there are no games except BF 1942, which I play almost daily, a very limited selection of Lindy Hop clips for teaching, and no pr0n! But with disk space at a critical low I needed to do something drastic. I can't move my music (which takes >50% of the space) off the laptop because it's my primary machine and I need it for DJing. So I needed to archive something else. I decided it had to be my iPhoto library -- now including something like 3-4 years of snapshots from various trips. It's grown to over 3.6 Gb in size in that time.

At the same time I needed to do a full backup. So to achieve this goal I decided to use the highly recommended and simple shareware tool, Carbon Copy Cloner. Good choice. After an hour or so I had backed up all user files onto an external drive painlessly. I also decided it would be a good idea to perform some routine maintenance and downloaded MacJanitor. This Freeware app runs a range of unix maintenance scripts that usually only get executed automatically late at night. Laptops like my Powerbook don't usually run these scripts because they're off at night, so every now and again it's a good idea to run something like this.

As a result of these two things, I now have an extra 8% of hard disk space so that I can at least keep going for a while. In the long term I need an upgrade, but for now I'm happy.