How to Use Apple's Spotlight to Make Room on Your Macintosh Hard Drive

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By Sum Dum Guy
eHow Community Member

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(9 Ratings)

Is the hard drive on your Apple Macintosh computer nearly full? Can't seem to figure out where all that hard drive space went? With these easy steps, you can quickly use Apple's handy Spotlight search feature to find and eliminate large, unwanted files and recover that lost hard drive space!

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Mac OS X 10.5 or newer
15 minutes of your time
A full hard drive

Step 1

Start in the Right Place
In the Apple Mac OS X Finder, open a new window by choosing the "File" option in the Apple menu bar and select "New Finder Window" from the list of choices. You can also do this by using the ⌘-N (Command and N) keyboard shortcut. Once the window is open, navigate to your user folder on the hard drive and select it (single click).
Step 2

Set Up Your Search
Type the ⌘-F (Command and F) keystroke to initiate a Spotlight search. In the pull-down menu that appears under the word "Search:", select the "Other..." option if an option for "Size" is not in the list. If it is already there, skip to Step 4.
Step 3

Add "Size" To Your Search Options
Once you've selected "Other...", a box will appear with a list of additional Spotlight search attributes. Scroll down to the "Size" option and click its checkbox in the "In Menu" column. If the attribute list is not alphabetized by name, click on the "Attributes" column heading.
Step 4

Define the Scope of the Your Search
Choose "Size" from the search pull-down menu. Once selected, define the size of the files you'd like to find by entering the necessary information in the 3 areas found to the right of the "Size" option. For example, you could select "is greater than", "100", and "MB", respectively, if you wanted to fid files that are greater than 100 megabytes. This will cause Spotlight to search for any file in the Users folder that is that size or greater. If that is not what you want to do, simply change the value of parameters to suit your needs.
Step 5

Dump the Clutter
Once Spotlight has displayed the list of qualifying files, carefully review them and decide which ones you no longer need. Drag any unwanted files to the Trash icon. After reviewing the contents of the Trash folder one last time (one can never be too careful about what you throw away), empty the Trash. Congratulations! You have just recovered some valuable hard drive space!