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How to get rid of those hidden files sucking up space on your Mac hard drive

Anyone who uses a Mac hard has crashed it a time or two. And most of us are used to finding the remains of documents in the Trash after a crash. Many programs put active files into a “Temporary Items Folder” that you can’t see. It’s at the root level of the hard drive, but you can’t see it without special utilities. When a program crashes on your Mac it would create a “Rescued Items” folder in the trash and move those files into it. These files are sometimes useful for recovering potentially lost data. Users of applications that create large files (like PhotoShop) know this rescued items folder can sometimes contain gigabytes of “dead” files. Not a good thing since it eats up valuable space on your drive. The solution has generally been simple: empty the trash.

Mac OS 9 doesn’t seem to move these files to the trash as reliably, so they now tend to build up on your hard drive in a place where you now can’t get at them. All the while they are eating up valuable drive space without you knowing it. Presumably this “bug” will be fixed in future versions, but for now there is a simple (and free) utility you can use to get rid of these unwanted files. It’s called Eradicator, and you can download your copy at: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-software/utilities.html.

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