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My hard drive on my macbook pro crashed the other day and I got a replacement from Apple with a vanilla snow leopard install. Upon returning home I used the Migration Utility to restore my previous data and configuration. So far, so good! Everything looks and works exactly the same as before the crash. However, I noticed these 2 directories that are taking up quite a bit of space:

/Developer (from old Mac)
/opt (from old Mac)

The question is can I safely remove these? As I said, my macbook pro appears to be restored completely to before the hard drive crash. I can run all my apps and all my files appear to be intact. Therefore it seems the system is not using these directories. Also because of their odd names it doesn't seem that os x is using them for any purpose.

Thanks in advance for any help!

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The key here is the rest of the folder name:

/Developer (from old Mac) /opt (from old Mac)

"(from old Mac)", that is what the Migration Utility add's to folders that it is copying over from your OLD MAC, when there is a naming conflict.

In otherwords, it didn't overwrite the new developer tools that came with your new system, it gave the old copy from your old system a slightly different name by appending "(from old Mac)" to the folder name.

Yes, you can safely remove them, assuming there isn't some data that you need from those folders...

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/Developer is the location of Xcode and all development tools and documentation.

/opt is mainly used by MacPorts for installing third party unix tools. Other third parties may use it as well.

These two directories are not needed by the system. Only you as a user can tell whether you need them.

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  • thanks for the answer. Yes I'm aware of the uses for the "regular" /opt and /Developer. My question really is if I need the ones from old mac? Again everything appears to be in working order.
    – ennuikiller
    Oct 28, 2009 at 13:29
  • You can safely remove /Developer. If you need it someday, you can download an up-to-date version from Apple. If you are not a unix user, you can also remove /opt. But I would back it up before, just in case.
    – mouviciel
    Oct 28, 2009 at 14:11

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