Mac OS X Leopard is quietly eating about 1 GB of disk space that it just doesn’t need to.
As with all releases of Apple software, Apple bundles language files with their software and operating systems. These files are needless for about 99% of users. They don’t affect your ability to type in other languages. What they provide are menus, dialog boxes, and other language translations. In short, they’re only useful if you want to use the program in question, in another language… not read or write documents that are written in another language.
Why does Apple do this? They claim it is to make things easier for you. But, in reality, it’s to help sell another Mac. See, if you install Leopard, iLife, and iWork (all three are bundled, at least in trial form, on a new Mac)… you wind up having upwards of three to five gigabytes of disk space eaten up. That’s over 6% of the hard disk space on a MacBook or Mac mini!
The vast majority of users, not knowing this is going on, wind up using up all the remaining space on their hard drive, and then have two choices: Send the files elsewhere, or buy a new Mac. Guess what unsophisticated users are more likely to do a few years down the road?
You can end this on your computer with Youpi Optimizer. It hunts down and deletes these junkware files.
Hopefully future Mac OS X releases will do what companies like Omni Group do, and offer English-only options during installation. This saves disk space, and makes the user more confident that the manufacturer is looking out for them. It wouldn’t be hard at all to offer inside of Installer.app, the Mac OS X Installer, and (optionally) inside of Disk Utility.
P.S. Going into Leopard and doing a custom install won’t save you from these files. The 1 GB amount I am quoting is taking into account the fact that you’ve unchecked all those additional lauguage installations… these are just the ones Apple forces on you. Also, the 1 GB count takes into account installing Xcode, it comes to about 875 MB without that.
Update: Unfortunately, bloggers some times don’t read the article that they link to… people are aparrently missing the P.S. note that I posted above. Please read the full article, and you will see that the 875 MB of language junk files are installed even if you exclude all language packs in a custom install. Doing an Easy Install (which enables all the optional language packs) causes the total number of non-English language files to jump to about 2 GB.
there’s also monolingual
You can customize language packs when installing Leopard. Apple has not force you to install them. Pre-installed OSs have full language packs for evident reason.
Reza, I realize that… but you missed where I said that 875 MB of language files are installed, even if you disable all language packs.
Language packs cause the 875 MB to surge up to about 2 GB. I was giving Apple the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that you did a custom install and disabled all language packs…
… it still puts almost a gigabyte of them in, like it or not.
Where the hell is all of my hard drive space going? Something in Leopard is eating it. This morning I started with over 15GB and now without adding more than 100MB of new files, I have less than 1.5GB of space left.
Zero G, try installing OmniDiskSweeper and seeing if it can find the file:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/
It’s also possible a log file or a swap file is growing without bound.
I removed a ton of stuff and turned off almost all of my fonts. That seemed to help. But the space on my HD is erratic. In the course of 3 hours it went from as low as 21.59GB to 43.38GB without me adding or deleting files. Also in this time period I wasn’t rendering anything.
Thanks for the advice.
You may also want to run Verify Disk inside of Disk Utility… it’s possible a directory error is causing the free space to be mis-reported.
Digg This: http://digg.com/apple/Tip_Recover_1GB_of_Wasted_Disk_Space_from_Leopard_s_Jaws
hi, i’m way late, but I’m having problems with space after my installation. are you saying I can delete all of the Xcode packages?
thanks!
To uninstall Xcode, you should download Pacifist and examine the Xcode package (or the receipt in /Library/Receipts) to see where it installed all of its files.
You can download Pacifist here: http://charlessoft.com/
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