Home Forums Hardware Mac Desktops & Notebooks Best way to reduce size of system drive?

I have an early 2009 MacPro running Snow Leopard. My current system drive is a 300 GB WD Velociraptor with about 120 GB on the drive. A large part of that space is taken up by two directories: Documents and Downloads. Is there an accepted or preferred method to move those two directories to another drive thereby reducing the size of the system drive? Could this be done with hard links or symlinks? My purpose is to prepare for using a SSD as the system drive and of course I don't want to buy a bigger drive than is necessary. Any suggestions are appreciated.

D.

Simply drag those folders to another drive. They will be copied to that drive. Then, trash the contents of those folders. That way, the folders themselves will be preserved (for possible future use) but you will have emptied them.

If the data you (re)move as per Jon's suggestion are important to you, it would be prudent to back them up on other media like CD/DVD in addition to the copy on HD. Single copies on any media would worry me (HDs and discs are cheap).

Ok, I really don't understand how that will preserve the links to those directories. For example, many programs automatically save to the Documents folder, which the system knows in under the /Users/MyName directory, and that's where the file will be written. Are you suggesting that every once in a while I just archive the contents of the directories on the system drive over to another drive? Yes, I could do that. Or are you telling me that by dragging those directories to another drive, the OS automatically knows that any program that wants to write to Documents or Downloads will be redirected to the second drive? Is OSX that smart?

D.

Good question. For downloads, you can to to Safari > Preferences > General and, where it says Save downloaded files to:, select Other from the popup menu. That gives you a window with the various volumes in the sidebar. You should be able to select the secondary drive and navigate to the desired folder. I don't know if you can select the secondary drive to save documents automatically so you'll have to look at the options in the individual programs that you are using.

For fine-tuning your Save-locations, check out Default Folder X; it's got a 30-day free trial.