If you are like me, occasionally (actually most of the time in my case) you run out of disk space on your hard drive and you wonder what is eating up so much space. Well in order to make some space in your hard drive you need to delete some files.

I am going to show you a quick way to find the files that take the most space on your machine. Here is how we begin:

1. First of all, we need to find the biggest files in your computer and start by deleting the ones that are no longer important.
In order to do this let’s use one of the great and powerful features of Tiger called “Smart Folders“.

Smart folders in Mac OS X Tiger (10.4 or better) is a kind of virtual folder that gives a way to save your searches. If for instance you need to find something on your computer on a regular basis, instead of repeating your search over and over, you can save your search query on Mac OS X. This is saved as a Smart Folder. Your smart folder then updates automatically every time relevant things change in your machine. At any given time you can modify your saved search query and it updates instantly.
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This being said, let me show you how to use the smart folder feature to quickly find the biggest files in your computer:

• open a finder window by clicking on the finder icon
• Go to File>New Smart Folder
  
• Edit your search parameters to reflect the query that you want to make. In this case…
  
• Hit Save. A window will pop up asking you to specify a name and location for your smart folder. Type a name for your query. You can keep the default location unchanged. Make sure that you keep the Add To Sidebar checkbox checked.
  

If your smart folder does not appear on the finder, you can find it in your home directory under Library>Saved Searched and you can drag it on the finder left column to make it appear there.

The beauty of this is that you can view your smart folders in icon view or list view. And at any time you can modify your search parameter and it will instantly update. In my case I chose two queries. One that will find all the files which size is between 100MB and 1GB, and another one that will show me all the files over 1GB. You can also modify the location where you want the search to be performed.

Now anytime you need to find the biggest files in your computer, just click on your smart folders and you are ready to decide which files to delete. And if someone ever tells you again that Mac isn’t cool, don’t feel bad to reply: are you out of your mind?

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