Free Up Space on MacBook Air or MacBook Pro ( 12 Easy Ways) 1. Delete Large Files on your Mac. Instead of deleting a hundred small files and images, first of all, let us go for the big fish. Click on the Apple logo from the upper left and select About This Mac. Now, click on Storage and then click on Manage. Click Documents. As any hard drive cleaner should, Stellar SpeedUp Mac can quickly and efficiently identify duplicate files and delete them to free up valuable disk space. If you’re really low on storage space and desperate for every single megabyte, then you can search specific languages and associated apps and remove them in one go. Open the Apple menu, then select About This Mac. Click the Storage tab in the toolbar to see how much disk space you have available. (On OS X Mountain Lion or Mavericks, click the More info.
1) boot your Mac from your OSX install DVD
2) choose your language and then 'ignore' (cancel) the installation
3) from the Top Menu (Utilities) start Disk Utility (DU)
4) in DU click on your harddisk (not any partition) in the left pane (the first item listed)
5) in the right pane use the 'Partition'-Tab
6) Drag the partition separator line until it encompasses the entire drive and then select apply.
7) Quit Disk Utility
8) reboot your Mac from your harddisk.
This procedure only works with OSX 10.5 Leopard or 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Since you are 'fumbling' with your OSX partition you should consider having/making a backup of it before trying the a.m. procedure. Just in case.
Regards
Stefan
Apr 4, 2011 5:22 AM
If you’re selling an old Mac with a hard drive, a spare hard drive, or you’re just quite paranoid about your deleted data, you’re either familiar with—or should be familiar with—the Erase Free Space button on the Erase tab in Disk Utility (found in your Applications -> Utilities folder).
Editor’s note: This Terminal tip originally ran in March 2009 and is only useful for mechanical hard drives and not the SSDs found in newer Macs.
When you click this button, you’re presented with three options for securely erasing the free space on your hard drive: write over the free space with zeros (fast and relatively safe), write over the free space three times (more secure, very slow), or write over the free space seven times (extremely slow).
This feature cane used whenever selling an old machine with a hard drive. Format the drive and install a fresh copy of macOS, then use Disk Utility to erase the free space (typically the one-time write-with-zeros option). This gives me a good sense of security, as it would take a team of dedicated professionals, and possibly special hardware, to have some chance of recovering any of my deleted data.
How Much Free Space Is On My Mac
Use Terminal to securely erase a drive
Zoo tycoon online. What if you want to do this from Terminal instead? In Terminal, a program named diskutil provides most of the features of macOS’s Disk Utility.
(Please note that, as with many Terminal commands, there’s a chance of Really Bad Things happening if you make a mistake with the following instructions. Proceed with caution, and make sure your backups are current before you try any of the following.)
To find out about diskutil in detail, type man diskutil at the Terminal prompt. Within the man pages, you’ll find the explanation for how to securely erase a disk’s free space using diskutil:
But how do you figure out what to list for device, which is the disk (or partition) that has the free space you’re trying to securely erase? diskutil can provide that information, too. Just use diskutil list to see a list of all drives and partitions. On the far right, you’ll see an IDENTIFIER column; that column contains the identifier that diskutil needs. Here’s an example of the list output on my machine:
IDG Cadkey full version.
Download dem4km.bgl fsx. There’s just one last bit of information you need to know to erase the free space on a hard drive from the command line. In Unix, all devices appear as part of the file system tree, and in macOS, they’re all listed in the /dev directory. So if I want to use diskutil to erase the free space on my Apple_HFS Untitled volume on my external drive, using the single-pass method, the final command would look like this:
Mac Free Space Command Line
diskutil secureErase freespace 1 /dev/disk2s1
Warning! It’s critically important that you include the freespace portion of that command. If you don’t, diskutil will happily start securely erasing the entire disk, instead of just the free space! Yes, that’s a Really Bad Thing, especially because it will be securely erased, meaning there’s no chance you’ll be able to recover the data.