Hard drive as bento box
See the vertical division? The stuff on the left is my files. The stuff on the right is the system, including applications, in orange near the top.
I was down to 4 remaining GB on my laptop. Photoshop groaned. Final Cut creaked. New client content threatened to fill up the remaining few slots. The situation was dire. Then I discovered Disk Inventory X. The way it works is to graphically show your files in a color-coded tile-like pattern. The color of a box shows the file type, and its size represents how much space each file is taking up on your hard drive. Click on the box and you learn exactly what the file is, and where it is. Thus I found and deleted such things as identical copies of videos used in long-ago job-applications. After a few such clean-ups my happy laptop hard drive is back to 53 GB!
While trying to figure out how to dump a large and mysterious file not of my own making, I also learned about the sleepimage file. It’s a Mac system file that contains a copy of the contents of your RAM when you put the beast to sleep. The info is thus restorable if the juice runs out while sleeping. The sleepimage file is always as big a the amount of RAM you have installed, which in my laptop’s case is 4 GB. So that’s the big green rectangle near the bottom right. The other green things under it are other systems files. I *could* get rid of it by turning off the hibernation feature, but I think I’ll leave it be.
This also explains why it takes my laptop so damn long to properly go to sleep. Every time it does so, it first copies the RAM into sleepimage. I’d learned early on not to try and re-wake it during the first minute of sleep, because that sometimes caused it to get stuck for ages. It’s good to know the sleep delay has a reason other than sheer digital obstinacy.