I am fed up with all these useless "Delete old pictures" "Delete your trash" BuzzFeed-tier articles so I am hoping for some qualified ideas here.
What I've done so far (and how much it deleted) is:
-
Monolingual (2.5gb) : deletes unused languages in applications.
I only kept Chinese and English. It can also delete classes for older architectures but that was only a few mb, languages is the main focus of that app. Many people say it destroys your applications but I've been using it for 5 months straight now and never experienced any problems -
OmniDiskSweeper (countless gb) : like TreeSizeFree on Windows it lists directories by size.
This way I for example found about 8gb of iTunes cache files that haven't been deleted, some xCode caches and simply big folders of other applications. If you "lower your standards" every session you will eventually end up even looking for folders smaller than 100mb but it's totally worth it as e.g. 6 of them already make half a gigabyte -
CCleaner (5gb) : well-known on Windows but not too popular among mac users it took care of my cache files (basically Chrome (2.2gb) and Ableton(1.5gb) but it also deleted some system caches
-
OnyX (300mb) : it's rather fixing stuff than deleting but it also looks for some temporary files that were meant to be – but never have been – deleted
-
deleting Garage Band (maybe 3gb) : as I am using nothing but Ableton for music production I deleted the app and most of its contents except for some fine drum samples
What else can i do? Having a 120gb MBA I have no choice but to locate every single file that's not completely necessary. It's just weird that, without installing applications, I see my drive getting more and more filled up with junk (I guess). Of course a system won't just magically lose "weight", but I can remember being at 45gb of free storage 10 months ago and my computer usage hasn't really changed since. (I am at 18gb now)
I might try CleanMyMac 3 at some point but I haven't heard about it too much yet.
EDIT: I will include your ideas in OP if it helped, but the best hint still gets a tick tho
Best Answer
So, it this is not a direct answer to your question because it is kind of a work around.
I totally agree with not having / wanting to spend more than you initially should have, but I think we need to start changing our mindset a bit. PC's and MAC's alike are coming with less internal storage options and somewhat force you to rely on the cloud and / or external storage.
So with that out of the way, this my workflow - I have a 128GB MBA, so I am in a similar position as you.
I bought am external USB3.0 drive that I carry with me all the time. On that drive I have my photo library and all the big stuff. I figure if I am doing anything that requires a substantial amount of work in my photos or iTunes, I will be sitting down and plugging in a drive is no biggy.
On my internal drive - I simply just have the apps and I only have the apps I use 70%+ of the day on my MBA drive - the rest lives on my external drive.
I also use Xcode and the latest beta takes up 7.5GB+ so that is a good chunk gone already, versus the Xcode 6 version which is 5.5GB so those 2 already take up over 10% of the drive.
So what I do is every 6 months I re-install my mac. Once when the new OS is out and once in the middle of the summer. All my data lives in the cloud like dropbox and I do not use my documents or pictures folder - they are pointing to my folders inside my dropbox folder - so all my data is save.
This way every 6 months, my temporary data is removed and I know it is, because my internal SSD is cleaned off. This process takes about a day, but it is saving me a lot of frustration.
I can appreciate not everyone can adjust their workflow around this, so to let you know I am an iOS developer and a teacher at a tertiary polytechnic so my data is super important.
Notes I store in Evernote and my files in Dropbox, iCloud I use as well, but not very much.
I hope this gives you an idea of how to help you manage this issue. It is a real pain to start of with, but if you treat your MBA purely as a data independent shell, than it may help your thinking about it a bit.
Hope it works for you :-)