2: Remove Speech Voicesĭon’t use text-to-speech and don’t care about all the fancy voices included with OS X? You can reclaim a significant amount of disk space by trashing them, the total space saved depends on how many voices have been installed. This is an advanced trick and should be treated accordingly. Sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3 sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage This can be undone by deleting the new sleepimage file again, then restoring hibernatemode to “3”: This can lead to data loss if your battery runs out and you have not saved a file recently, so be sure to keep on top of your important documents once battery life gets low. This will prevent sleepimage from being created and hibernation mode from working at all. Still in /private/var/vm/ we must now prevent OS X from creating the file, so we’ll make a dummy and prevent write access to it:.Remove the sleep image file with the following string:.Next go to /private/var/vm/ to delete the existing sleep image file:.Open Terminal and enter the following command:.The downside to this is that if a Mac runs out of battery life, you will not be able to resume instantly where things left off – in other words, keep Auto-Save enabled and save your documents when you’re nearing the end of battery life. Turning this feature off will that file from being created, thereby freeing up system RAM. That hibernation file is the same size as your total RAM, meaning a Mac with 4GB of RAM will have a 4GB hibernation file, 8GB RAM will be an 8GB file, etc. Essentially, hibernation dumps the contents of RAM to a sleepimage file on the hard disk when a Mac is put to sleep or runs out of battery. This turns off OS X’s native hibernation function, known as SafeSleep. You have been warned, so proceed at your own risk. Do not use copy and paste, and be sure you have the precise path set before executing the command. One minor typo could result in file loss and damage to core OS files due to the destructive nature of the ‘sudo rm’ command. If you’re a newcomer to OS X this is not for you. If in doubt about a specific trick or command syntax, it’s safer to avoid it completely and rely on more traditional methods offered here of reclaiming disk space when things get tight on a Mac. These tricks are fairly advanced and thus aimed at the pro segment of SSD users who are comfortable modifying system functions and files through the command line with potentially risky commands like ‘rm -rf’ and wildcards – if that does not describe your skill set, then this article is not for you and you should use these easy tips instead.Īlso, some of these tricks disable certain system functions and may have side effects that would be considered undesirable to the average user, so be sure to understand that before using them on a given Mac. Running out of disk space is never fun, and drive space comes at a premium for those of us with smaller SSD drives like the MacBook Air with a 64GB or 128GB drive.

How to manage storage on macbook air