great little tip from ‘macfixit’ which i have just tried and regained 6GB of invisible unused space on my macbook pro, it does involve a terminal command, which i find very scary but trust me, it works…
sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage
In newer laptop models, Apple has implemented a hibernation sleep mode which will activate before all power is lost to the system (ie: the battery is about to die). When hibernation is activated, the computer will write all the contents of RAM to the disk in this "sleepimage" file, and then set the hardware to read the contents of this image back to RAM upon wakeup, before cutting all power to the system components and essentially shutting down the computer.
This is different from standard "sleep" mode, where RAM maintains its information and still draws power so the computer can more quickly start up.
Is it safe to delete?
Absolutely. The image will be recreated the next time your computer goes into hibernation mode, so if you are not regularly going into hibernation mode you can enter the following command in the Terminal to delete the file and free up some hard drive space (the image will be the same size as the amount of RAM in your system):
sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage
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