How to Deal When Your Mac Says "Start Up Disk is Almost Full"

The other day my mac told me to delete items because my star-up disk was full. I like my items-my pictures, my music and my documents, and wanted to keep them. Here's what I did.

Things You'll Need

• Your mac
• Your ipod
• A Lacie Disc

Instructions

1. 

   USE YOUR IPOD FOR VIDEO AND MUSIC STORAGE:
   Your Movies, Music and Video files take up a lot of space. The amount of space that your files take up are listed on the bottom of your itunes window. Mine currently says 2.2 GB, which is pretty low. My iPod holds 80 GB of music and video. (Use an IPod with high gigs, depending on how much music and video you have, when in doubt go with the highest GB number you can afford) By moving all my music and movies to my iPod and deleted them from itunes, I freed up over 50 GB of space on my hard drive.
   Be careful when you do this, you don't want to delete your music. More detailed instructions on how to delete music on itunes can be found online, but here are the basics: Connect your Ipod to your ma with the USB cord. Start by setting your iPod to manual. Then make sure all your music and video are on your iPod. Disconnect your iPod. Now drag the files in itunes to the trash, or highlight them and hit delete. From now on, whenever you want to hear your music or watch movies, then just plug in your iPod and play it through iTunes.

2. FREE UP MORE SPACE WITH A LACIE DISK
   Get yourself a Lacie backup drive. They are very easy to use. Just plug it in and follow the prompts to save your stuff. Basically and LacieDisk is a storage space for all your files, documents and images. When you have things stored on your Lacie. You can then safely delete them on you computer by dragging them into the trash and emptying it. Lacie is a simple place to store images and documents that you aren't using. In the future, when you need to use file from Lacie, simply drag it back onto your desktop and open it from there.

3. ENJOY YOUR SPACIOUS HARD DRIVE
   Say good-bye to that annoying little message box that was bugging you to free up disk space.

Tips & Warnings

• Do not tell your iPOd to sync with itunes after you empty your itunes songs. Only sync manually!

• It's also a good idea to back-up your itunes music folder onto your Lacie disk befroe you delete it from your computer.

• Don't trash anything until you are sure it is safely backed up!

• Don't forget, you cannot work with any thing directly out of the Lacie drive, first you have to drag it out of the Laci window and onto your desktop.