Is my music still clogging my hard drive? (Mac)

I'm getting rid of a computer, transferred all the music to backup drives, seems OK.

BUT, the hard drive says 110GB used out of 250GB. Which happens to be about how much music I had on this particular old machine. Coincidence? There are only 4 folders on the hard drive now: Applications (3GB), Library (5GB), Users (3GB), System (0.2GB). That does NOT total 110! I've emptied trash, repaired permissions, rebooted, repaired the disc...

???

 

You can check it by following these steps: http://osxdaily.com/2014/01/11/see-mac-disk-usage-storage-summary-os-x/

 

Something you should probably do regardless is create a new user, give it admin rights, log in as said user, and delete the "you" user.

 

Do you have an iPhone/iPad?
If so there is a hidden folder called library in your user folder.
Hold down the option key and select "Go" for the menu bar, there will be the hidden Library folder.
In it is a folder called "Application support/MobileSync.
that has all of your iPhone / iPad backups, and can take up a considerable amount of space.
I usually back them up to another drive once and a while and then all but the latest.
Also the new Photos app puts all of your photos on the system drive by default. And only there can it share photos to your other devices.
Kind of a screwup.

I hope this helps
mdr

 

I did that

 

Oh, REALLY? I will take a look at that, thanks.

It turns out, I re-ran "repair" the next day and it said a bunch of files were misallocated or some other goof. Very weird that it didn't say that the previous day when I did that.

But I'm still inputting to this thread because now I have a similar (or maybe not) situation with another machine...

 

Oh, that's going to return scary looking stuff every single time you run it, most likely. Back when I worked in tech support and there weren't any actual problems to fix, I'd show the user that to make them feel like I was doing something useful.

 

That's funny! Although in this case, the error actually made sense compared to the symptom. Odd that it didn't do that the day before, but that's corruption for you I guess.

 

With regard to that hidden folder, is the data important enough to be backed up, which I'm doing via Time Machine? Either way, can that folder's contents be deleted?

 

That hidden folder "library" contains not just mobilesync (iPhone/iPad backup data) but other files that you should not remove/ delete.
Keep the latest backup in the folder so iTunes can properly continue to backup and sync your "i" device.
Only then delete the earlier backups in the mobilesync folder after you have backed them up separately.
Not just a time machine backup.

 

If you are getting rid of a Mac, shouldn't you do a clean install. You can reinstall OS X right up until the language prompt and the new owner will be getting a pristine machine.

 

IT's a lot more trouble than just deleting stuff, which in UNIX is pretty secure. I really don't care if someone recovers my files of recipes
and anything really important I securely delete-the NSA already has all that information anyway.

 

Actually a Mac is very easy to bring back to stock with a clean hard drive. Much simpler than a PC.