Many Mac models still have small disk drives… the 12-inch MacBook in particular, as well as MacBook Air. SSD disk space still has quite a premium.
That’s why it’s very ironic that a disk drive maker’s software is such a space hog.
Seagate’s Dashboard utility has a built-in software update function. And that’s great. Unfortunately, it keeps a copy of the .dmg disk image, for each and every version it downloads. It does not even clean up the old versions, once the new versions are installed!
This means if you dutifully upgrade every Seagate Dashboard version, each taking 150+ MB per piece, you could have the better part of a gigabyte of SSD disk space, consumed by hidden .dmg files.
You can reclaim this space by deleting all the .dmg files located in ~/Library/Application Support/Seagate Dashboard 2.0/
To get there, go to the Finder, click the Go menu at the top, and select Go to Folder. Then paste in the path in italics above – including the ~ symbol at the start. You need to do this on the administrator account, as the installers are stored in a user-specific folder.
Needless to say, Seagate needs to fix this. They need to do two things:
- Add a task that searches for these hidden .dmg files, and removes them – so future versions clean up the mess of older versions.
- Ensure the .app/.pkg installer removes the currently-downloaded .dmg file – after the install process completes (say, by moving it to the Trash). That ensures that the installer won’t continue to create new junk.