Snatch back wasted disk space from Leopard's jaws

Blogger Christopher Price recently pointed out that Leopard is greedily eating up about 1 GB of disk space by dumping unnecessary language packs onto your computer's hard drive. Christopher makes two interesting points about this.

First, the language bundles aren't necessary for typing or editing documents in other languages, they're simply there for translating the menus, dialog boxes, etc. of native apps. Second, a custom Leopard install won't help you avoid bundle overload because deselecting these files isn't an option.

To wrench your precious disk space from the greedy jaws of Leopard, Price recommends deleting them with Youpi Optimizer. I ran the program on my Leopard-ized iMac and was amazed to find that it freed up more than 4 GB of space. My partner ran it on his Tigered MacBook Pro and he recovered around 2 GB.

Price says he thinks the bundle bloat is a deliberate attempt by Apple to sell more computers with bigger hard drives. I don't necessarily agree with that but it did get me to wondering: What other unneeded files are lurking in our systems that we can delete without affecting performance? Thoughts? Ideas? Bueller?

View Tags

Source: http://www.christopherprice.net/2007/11/07/leopard-1-gb-of-w…

Categories

Software Leopard

Blogger Christopher Price recently pointed out that Leopard is greedily eating up about 1 GB of disk space by dumping unnecessary...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

47 Comments

Filter by:

Alex in Amsterdam

Do NOT try this software. I did and it totally screwed up my system. Finder refused to work again. I had to re-install Leopard again with a completely clean install. Luckily I had just backed up my entire hard drive. What a piece of crap!
TUAW - you should check things out further before you recommend something!

December 02 2007 at 3:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Yaniv

languages are the lesser culprit!
look in /Library/Printers...
there's over 3GB of printer drivers there!
i just deleted them all (saved the PPD's folder though).
i don't even own or use a printer!!!

November 14 2007 at 1:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brian H. Marston

I tried this tip on my PowerBook G4 running Leopard. I set "Languages not to delete" in Youpi to "English (United States)." The only language listed in my International System Preferences is English. I clicked the "Optimize Selection" button and then the "Delete" button in Youpi.

After I ran Youpi, the menus in several applications (Preview, Safari, TextEdit, etc.) were changed to Swedish. I don't know how to get back the English menus.

November 10 2007 at 4:01 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Brian H. Marston's comment

Rich

I had the same problem. When I upgraded to Leopard (clean install I thought) it did not put the English files back on my machine so I'm stuck searching for individual lprogs within each service bundle on my machine and then copying them from someone else's computer. Does anyone know of a better way?

December 15 2007 at 4:05 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jon Crawford

Uhh... Something about the dialog box on this app made me pretty nervous.

http://img187.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture11cm7.png (Look closely.)

November 09 2007 at 1:56 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Wes Morgan

DON'T DO THIS!!!

I did it on my Leopard install, told it not to delete any English language files, and it proceeded to delete English language files from most of my apps (including built-in ones like Safari and Quicktime).

Thanks for the suggestion, TUAW. :(

November 08 2007 at 7:56 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Bama

got rid of 5 GB on my macbook drive! yeeeaaahh! leopard taking a whole 10 GB really hurt but now i got half of that back!

November 08 2007 at 4:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

SGraf

Stuart:Who cares about a couple of gigabytes? Is it really worth the risk of screwing something up (as has clearly been the case for some)? Storage is cheap, about $2.50 per gigabyte by my last purchase. Is the risk worth saving $5.00?

I care, because I have a Macbook, and I want to have a dual-bootable system with Ubuntu without having to drop a ton of money on a new notebook drive. Cost/GB is cheap for desktop drives, but a huge 2.5" drive that will hold two bootable systems' worth of OS and applications plus a 30 gig ipod's worth of music is bloody expensive!

November 08 2007 at 3:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Benjamin

Also, another disk space hog I found today after my fresh Leopard installation are the Japanese dictionaries under /Library/Dictionaries. A couple of hundred megabytes there for the freeing.

November 08 2007 at 10:03 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

christapher

the reason you couldnt uncheck it is because you were doing an upgrade and those were the packs that were already on your computer.

when i did a clean install i was able to uncheck every one of them and i was fine

November 08 2007 at 10:00 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Victor Marshall

I use Disk Inventory X to clear out all the crap I don't need and I ended up clearing up 20gb of stuff.. I took out programs that no longer work with leopard also. I also used it to clean my windows boot camp partition.

November 08 2007 at 8:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply