Tiger loves my hard drive... too much.

I had to delete files like mad while Mail 2.0 was importing messages from Mail 1.x because it was devouring free disk space like it was going out of style.

Because of Spotlight, Mail now has to store each message in its own file! According to Mail, I had 392,877 messages to import. I do not look forward to my next rsyncx backup. Ouch.

To make matters worse, Mail might be storing each message twice, once inside its Mailbox's mbox file, and then once on its own in the Messages subfolder of its mailbox. Is this necessary? I'm wondering if it's just an artifact of the import process, that Mail didn't clean up after itself. I'd love to delete the mbox files to free up several GB of disk space. And of course, those nearly 400,000 messages must be taking up a lot of space in the Spotlight index which appears to be about 150MB in size right now.

I have a 60GB hard drive and it's damn near full and I don't think I even have much on there. Yeah, my iTunes Library is 17GB and my iPhoto Library is over 5GB, and I have about 4GB of Virtual PC disk images, but past that, I don't have much personal data on the disk. Basically just Tiger, devtools, Office 2004, Macromedia Studio MX, and some other little apps. I even deleted my 3.9GB Download folder and over 1GB of QuickTime files in my ~/Movies folder. Where's the other 30GB? I've started sweeping my drive using OmniDiskSweeper to find out.

Oh, and Spotlight is still indexing. I wonder if I'll have any disk space left at all when I wake up. :-/

Written on May 1, 2005