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Over the past months I’ve had two issues and after some research I’ve not only solved both of them but also discovered that they were loosely related.

My first issue was my ever narrowing amount of hard drive space, with Aperture and iTunes libraries growing out control I have piles of external hard drives but still find it necessary to carry around a large amount of data. I used a useful tool called Disk Inventory X to help me identify what was taking up hard drive space and could either be moved or deleted.

After some success I discovered a system file taking up a whopping 2GB of space, the file named “sleepimage” was hidden away in private/var/vm/ not a folder easily navigated to.

My second problem was noticeable sleep times when I closed the lid of my MacBook Pro, I found myself always waiting around 20-30 seconds for it fully sleep and settle down before sweeping it off the desk (avoiding potential hard drive damage).

So a bit of investigation and I discovered that the “sleepfile” image is an effect of Safe Sleep which creates an exact clone of my RAM when I put my Mac to sleep and in the event that power is lost when sleeping nothing will be destroyed because a perfect image is saved on the hard drive.

I decided that this was fairly useless to me so I went about disabling Safe Sleep and removing the 2GB image file.

To do the same perform the following commands in the Terminal:

sudo pmset hibernatemode 0
sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

A restart later and I had 2GB extra of hard drive space and my MacBook Pro sleeps in under 3 seconds, perfect!