In 1995 I purchased a first-generation Apple Power PC 8100. At the time, I worked mostly with music and graphic files, and was certain that the 750 MB hard drive would serve me well for many years...

Today, I have a G4 Graphite model with two hard drives - the original 20 GB and an additional 80 GB. And they are fillin' up fast!

Now, a full hard drive isn't necessarily a bad thing... it means you've been happy and productive. You should be proud of yourself. On the other hand, files of all kinds are not getting any smaller, and frankly, its a pain offloading everything to zip drives and other media - or having to buy a new HD at a moment's notice.

Here are eleven ways to reclaim hard drive space on your Mac:

1. Get AppZapper, go through your application folder and "zap" all your unused and unnecessary applications and their associated files. (This is not as simple as just dragging it to the trash under OS X. You can download a demo of AppZapper below.)
2. Download the freeware application Monolingual and get rid of all non-local language files. This alone can give you back 2 GB.
3. Open iPhoto and get rid of any photos you no longer need. IPhoto has it's own application trash, so you'll need to empty that one as well.
4. Open iTunes and get rid of any music or podcasts you no longer listen to. (Its appalling how these just accumulate.)
5. Go through all your docs, movies and pictures. If you haven't looked at or thought about it in a year or more - nuke it.
6. Clear out your old e-mail messages in AppleMail.
7. In Library>Caches, you'll see files related to applications you no longer have. Nuke 'em. Go to Library>Preferences and do likewise.
8. In Library>Safari, delete the "icons" folder. This stores all the icons of the websites you visit, which you don't need. One bonus here is that it will speed up your Safari web browsing.
9. In Music>GarageBand, nuke all demo songs.
10. If you no longer have any "Classic" applications, get rid of OS 9. To do this, drag the OS 9 System AND Applications folders to the Trash from the root of your hard drive.
11. If you don't need it, delete the Xcode Installer from Applications>Installers.

If following these steps don't free up substantial space on your hard drive...well, maybe it's time to think about that external one...

Download: [AppZapper Demo]
Download: [Monolingual]