Katie and David discuss spring cleaning your Mac.
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Links of note
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Dishwashing your Keyboard
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Macworld on cleaning your iTunes library
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Data Liberation
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:21:48 — 38.0MB)
You mentioned again the fact that Omnifocus backs up an obscene amount of data, never deleting it.
What’s most annoying is that there is no setting to change this or turn off backing up all together (I use their online sync, have time machine, and never need the backups)
But, assuming you
OK. You could run a hazel rule on it’s folder. But if you want to be a wise-guy, set omnifocus’s backup directory to ~/.Trash! You’ll have to enable hidden folders while you use it’s Open dialog, but the humor is worth it. And unless you delete your trash voraciously (I just let hazel delete files after 2 weeks, or manually whenever), you’ll still get some backup just in case.
oops. no preview + no edit. Please disregard the line “But, assuming you”
Afraid I can’t recommend setting any file backup location to the trash – that’s just asking for trouble. However, just to be clear. We didn’t mean to insinuate that OmniFocus backed up an obscene amount of data. It never has for me. David is an edge use case running multiple instances on multiple machines, many entire databases for demo and testing purposes. I don’t think the normal user is going to have the same problem.
EagleFiler supports mail archiving (at least from Apple Mail). DEVONthink Pro Office also supports e-mail archiving from Apple Mail. Both have had these features for a long time, so it’s not just Mail Steward that’s been doing this. The advantage of these solutions is that they do much more than just e-mail.
I’m still (OS 10.7.3) using an ancient preference pane called Macaroni to de-localize my system (i.e. strip out non-English support files). Works in the background, and never a problem. I’m sure there are newer apps that do this as well.
What a great thing it would be to know which fonts we could dump safely. I search around now and again for definitive wisdom, but never seem to find conclusive advice. I find writing in languages with a roman alphabet hard enough, and promise that I’ll never need Cyrillic or character-based typefaces. It would be nice to take charge of this. Perhaps a future show topic?
I listened to this on a road trip, so forgive the question not being too exact, I tried finding the section again but didn’t find it quickly and I’m impatient
Two things:
First, I recall you mentioning something about the iLifeAssetManagement folder (I just downloaded Daisy Disk and have been exploring my drive, much better than my old method of using finder, sorting by size and waiting for all the sizes to pop up). I see this Asset folder and it is large at 2.3GB, and I thought I’d share mehtod of dealing with this since I have a small SSD (64GB) as my startup disk. I’ve been creating Symlinks (different from aliases of course) for large system folders and moving them off to one of the other large HDDs in my MacPro. I’ve created a little Automator script to create the Symlink since it requires terminal work otherwise. But it’s been a great system, essentially copy the folder to the HDD, make a Symlink with the same name and move the symlink over to the original location on the SSD. Did it for Mail and other folders, works great for me. The only caveat I would think is that it does kinda defeat the performance boost of an SSD, so if it’s a program you use often, might not be the best option.
2nd. I recall something you said about items on the Desktop taking up more resources or space than files in other locations, or did I just mishear something?
Thanks!
Thank you for your comments on Hover. I’m considering switching, but I also use a certain unmentionable company for hosting. Who do you recommend for hosting?
I use 1&1, David uses SquareSpace
Thank you for your response! I was looking at SquareSpace over the weekend. Probably because I’ve heard Merlin talk about it so much…
A lot of great information in the podcast. I purchased a copy of DaisyDisk and was able free up 100GB on my MacBook Pro in <30 minutes. I found 37GB of that in media cache files. Without DaisyDisk, I would not have known where to look.
DaisyDisk is cute-looking and great if you truly prefer a graphic interface. Kudos to them also for sponsoring the podcast. But if you find DD to be a tad more dazzle than help, you can’t beat the clarity of Omni Group’s free OmniDiskSweeper (http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper/). I have both, and enjoy DD’s technicolour effects, but for the real work of cleaning up my Mac I always end up back with ODS. It shows you everything in a Finder-like column view, sorted and color-coded by size, and – for me at least – makes things clearer much faster than sorting through DD’s fireworks. Full of Omni goodness – and, say it again, FREE.