This past weekend, I got my serious tech geek on and took on the task of doing a clean "erase and install" on my two Mac's with the new Apple operating system, "Snow Leopard" (OS X 10.6). One of the features of Snow Leopard ("SL") is that the installation process has been greatly improved such that Apple recommends that users do not do an "erase and install" and simply upgrade the operating system on top of their current setup.
However, the relatively puny hard drive (80 GB) of my MacBook Air was over 90% full, seriously degrading performance. So I thought I would take the occasion of an operating system upgrade to really purge, and explore new setups like creating a separate media server on my wireless backup drive. My iTunes library was about 30 GB alone, a lot of it old television series (video files) I had purchased way back in the day and will never watch again. Grey's Anatomy Season Two, anyone? And my photo library was 13 GB.
SL itself leaves a much smaller footprint than its predecessor, Leopard (OS X 10.5). Installing SL freed up at least 5 GB of space alone. One of the main reasons I upgraded was because of SL's built in connections to Microsoft Exchange, my employer's mail (and calendaring) system. So I also was able to get rid of Microsoft Entourage (Microsoft's very clumsy Mac answer to Outlook) and it's 2 GB database.
Apologies to several coworkers, clients and candidates who I think received a small flurry of meeting cancellations and deletions as a result of this. Its unclear to me if the upgrade created some duplicate meetings, or if the duplicates were sitting on my work's Exchange server all along and I was able to "see" them for the first time after the upgrade. Oddly enough, there seemed to be no real rhyme or reason as to which meetings were duplicated; it was probably half of them. Regardless, one of the more painful time sucks this past weekend was eliminating the duplicate meeting files off of my work's Exchange server one by one ...
I also took the occasion of spending all of this time in front of my computers to start exploring video a bit. One of the primary reasons I finally upgraded my first gen iPhone this summer was because supposedly the video recording capability of the iPhone 3GS is decent. And I thought it might be fun to start capturing impromptu video. (Of course, you want to talk about large file sizes ... at the same time, Apple has apparently dumbed down the HD capability of the hardware inside the iPhone 3GS so that the file sizes are manageable over AT&T's crummy 3G network to conserve the battery.) More video to come, but early indications make it clear that there is no Steven Spielberg in these genes.
At the end of the day, my MacBook Air's drive is only 30 GB full, and both machines are running even faster. And I got to revisit my inner tech geek, even if for just a little while.
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