Freeing Up Hard Disk Space
From Mac Guides
To free up hard disk space, the first step is to know what to remove.
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Empty your Trash
The most basic thing is to empty your Trash regularly. Unless you're unsure of whether you may need a deleted file later, there's no reason to have a Trash brimming with files.
Remove applications you don't use
Your Mac comes with a lot of commercial applications on a trial basis (like Microsoft Office, FileMaker etc.). If you know that you're not going to use those applications, remove them! Open your Applications folder (with command-shift-A in Finder), drag unused applications to the Trash and then empty the Trash.
Remove downloaded files
Whenever you download applications to install, make sure you move or delete the disk image (.dmg) files. See this section in Installing Applications in OS X for more detail.
Clear web browser caches
To improve performance, all web browsers store downloaded pages and files in a cache so that they can re-use those files (instead of re-downloading them) if you visit those same pages again. Clearing the cache could provide some free space. Although clearing the cache for security reasons is a good thing, it reflects very poorly on your disk space management skills if you have to do it to save space! Clearing the browser cache can be done in the your web browser's Preferences window (command-,).
Remove disk space hogs
Delete data that you don't need, or move them to an external hard disk, CDs or DVDs. To avoid wasting time in moving or deleting files or folders that don't provide a huge benefit, first take stock of what you have and find out which folders or files occupy a lot of space. To do this, you could download and install an application, like the free application Disk Inventory X (please consider donating some money to help the developer). Run it and it will show you the space used by various kinds of files in a hierarchical order. Once you know which ones to delete, move them to the Trash (or hit command-delete), then empty it.
Run maintenance utilities
Free system maintenance utilities like MainMenu or Onyx can help clean up temporary files, system caches and logs (please consider donating some money to help the developers). This should also be considered more as a maintenance task than a disk space saving task.
Archive your E-Mail
Saving every copy of every email to the harddrive may not be an option when space is tight. Consider archiving the email.
