Saving Disk Space On My MacBook Pro With Squeeze!
Disk space is a finite resource that I wish was infinite. I wish I could just download anything, store unlimited movies, music and pictures but this is a fantasy concept for now. I recently backed everything up off my my MacBook Pro to external storage and reloaded the operating system. This is not a fun process, but a necessary one for me sometimes. It gives me the opportunity to refocus by installing only the applications I need to be productive. I reduce clutter and overhead by not installing all the utility applications I often run because they intrigued me.
One particular application / utility I am running though is Squeeze. It’s a pretty awesome application that runs in the background utilizing a very small resource of your system to essentially save you disk space. As you can see from the the screenshot below, that I’m saving almost 5 and a half gigabytes of disk space with this application.
According to the makers of Squeeze, they claim that it will not have any affect on backups, accessing files, or restoring data what compressed using the application because it utilizes a feature of snow leopard so it’s actually a system feature (and sorry, the software is 10.6 only, no 10.5) so even though the application might be uninstalled the files can still be decompressed. Their site promotes squeeze as “a background file compressor, which uses the new HFS-compression technology in Snow Leopard to transparently compress the folders you configure it to process. Mac OS will read those files normally, they will just take less disk space.
As you can see above it has a simple interface via the System Settings to add and remove folders that you wish to have compressed. I have been running it since I reloaded my machine two weeks ago and haven’t noticed any performance hits and it is very discreet running in the background. I have also tested backing those files up via Time Machine, and restoring them on another machine without squeeze and they worked just fine.
The application runs for $12.95 and can be purchased at the Clusters website. I don’t know if the value is there for you, but for me, if I can stretch the disk space I have (currently 250gb) for an additional year or two without reloading and refocusing, that $12.95 bought me some time. Overall I’d say it was a good value for me, but may not be for everybody. Let me know your thoughts or concerns with compression applications.
