How can I figure out where all my hard drive space is going?

Do you use FileVault? If so, do you regularly restart and recover disk space? If you don’t, that could be one reason.
Otherwise, if you’re looking to find what takes up space – best thing I can think of is list view in finder and organise by size – and don’t forget to check your drop box! Maybe a friend has left you lots of nice and big files….?

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

That will help you visualize what is taking up space. Here is what my main drive looks like according to that tool.

http://www.indielyrics.info/hey.png

Thank you JP, I’m scanning right now, but if something doesn’t work out then I’ll ask some more.

As for people reading this after this conversation, feel free to input your knowledge, you never know who you might help in the future by posting something now.

JP, well it is showing everything accordingly, but I can’t figure out what I can and cannot delete. It says I have a lot of localized previous systems, I did have to restore a new hard drive with Time Machine, but I don’t think those are from my original system. Then again I have a HUGE amount of tiny files. Here is the picture of my hard drive with default scan settings, just look at all the tiny files haha. Well any more ideas?

Alternatively, you can use Disk Inventory X, a similar program to the one jp mentioned, with a slightly tackier 80’s look. However, I use it regularly and it works fairly well for me.

Also, what is that absolutely HUUGE file in your disk ‘image’?

That’s Parallels’ virtual hard drive, it’s only 30GB.

OK. So firstly let’s say that your hard drive has a capacity of 118GB, since you have 30GB reserved for your virtual drive, and you state the formatted capacity of the entire HD to be about 148GB. Now you say that you have 20GB left, which would lead me to conclude that you should be using 98GB for file storage. If your user folder is 78GB in size, that leaves a nice 20GB of… what?

Well for starters, remember that your Applications folder is not part of your user folder. This could be another few GBs. Also, if you have the Developer Tools installed, there’s another potential storage user. Thirdly, and probably most importantly, are your System and Library folders. These are both crucial to your computer, and are therefore quite large. Mine take up a total of about 13.5GB (this is running Leopard). Therefore, is it possible that your Applications – and possibly Developer – folders take up the last 6.5GB or so? I wouldn’t be surprised. Keep in mind that Mac OSX does not show hidden files, which could also be taking up a certain amount of the few GBs.

Grarage band and all the associated library files are HUGE! Most of it is loops in your Library/Application Support about 2gb worth. If you don’t use it, delete it. you can always reinstall it from the dvds later

Apps:3.46GB
Library:4.96GB
Dev Tools:1.33GB

I have to go now as in a hurry so can you crunch those numbers?

I have also heard the the international language support files take up a lot of room. I have not used them, but it looks like there are a few programs that help remove them. DeLocalizer, monolingual and TinkerTool System Has anyone used any of these?

Well now that I look with the Apps, Dev Tools, and the Library separate, it leaves about 10GB. I found out that those last 10GB were from Previous_Systems.localized. I deleted all of them so now I have around 40GB with all the extra media I got rid of too.

Saved me about 2GB stripping out all the additional languages from my OS X Install with Monolingual

Be really careful with Monolingual.. My previous comment from this question still applies.

Monolingual has a very destructive option set by default. It will strip out PowerPC code rendering some applications unusable on Intel Macs if you don’t disable it first. I had to reinstall Photoshop because I was stupid and not paying attention. That was before CS3 came out.

They should be fine if they only remove the languages. But it is easy to switch over to the Architectures tab and screw everything up.

@johnpowell I second grand perspective. Easy enough interface, doesn’t slow down my MBP while it runs. You can change colors or how deep or wide the directory you want to scan/map for.