How To Free Up Disc Space On Mac
When the disk on your Mac is almost full, you may receive the above warning message and find that your Mac runs slower than usual. You can then take the easy steps below to check the disk space on your Mac, and may need to use the 10 methods provided in the second part to free up disk space.
Let’s get started.
To free up disk space, it’s helpful to know exactly what is using disk space on your Mac. A hard disk analysis tool like Disk Inventory X will scan your Mac’s hard disk and display which folders and files are using up the most space. You can then delete these space hogs to free up space. The bigger the files you can delete, the more space you can free up—so let's go hunting. Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the menu bar and choose About This Mac. If that overview.
Cleaner One Pro is your all-in-one disk cleaning manager. You can visualize, manage and free up your storage space in just a few clicks. Starting with a Smart Scan for your Mac, you can also take advantage of the Big Files detector, Duplicate Files and Similar Photos finder to delete all the useless junk files and free up more space. MAC temporary files sometimes take up huge disk space. Removing them will not only speed up your system but also free up disk space. There are tons of temporary files that you can check out by opening Finder and then go to Folder using /Library/Caches. Free Up More Than Enough Disk Space on Your Mac. Are you having problems with a slow Mac? Instead of taking it to a repair shop or throwing it out, take strides to clear up a bit of disk space. You’ll be surprised at the number of duplicate files and applications that are bogging your computer down.
How to check disk space on Mac
You can simply follow these steps:
- Click the Apple Icon, and select About This Mac.
- Click Storage. And you’ll see how much free space is available and what are taking up the used space.
If you are running out of disk space, you can try the methods below to free up some.
How to free up disk space on Mac
Method 1: Use recommendations
A quick fix would be to click the Manage button to use recommendations for optimizing your storage. You’ll see fewer options if some of them are already enabled.
Method 2: Use cloud storage
Besides iCloud and iTunes, you can also use other cloud storage tools to store your content and save disk space on Mac. There’re many cloud storage applications available on the Web or inside the Mac App Store. Among them, you can try AnyTrans.
AnyTrans breaks the sync boundaries and builds highways between all your devices. With it, you can transfer your data and files across iOS devices, Android mobiles, PC/Mac, and cloud storage. Freely, flexibly and unlimitedly.
Method 3: Use external drives
You can also move big and infrequently used files (e.g. movies, photos and audio) to a USB drive with a large storage capacity, say, 500GB, to effectively free up space on your Mac.
Method 4: Delete downloads
As you may frequently download files from browsers and mail, the Downloads folder is probably taking up several Gigabytes of free space. So you can navigate to the path below to delete downloads that are not needed any more to free up your disk space.
Machintosh HD > Users > Current User > Downloads
Method 5: Clear caches
Caches in apps and browsers can pile up and occupy a good portion of disk space over time. So it’s a good idea to periodically clear caches and free up disk space. To do so, you can:
- In the menu bar, click Finder, then select Go.
- Click Go to Folder.
- Type ~/Library/Caches.
- Delete the files or folders that’re taking up the most space.
- Type /Library/Caches.
- Again, delete large folders/files.
Method 6: Remove logs
In the Library folder, you can also find the Logs folder, which stores some temporary files of the system, apps and mobile devices. You can remove unnecessary files/logs in it to free up space.
Method 7: Delete iTunes backups
If you often back up your iPhone with iTunes, the backups may take up much space on your Mac. To have a check, you can go to iTunes > Preferences > Devices.
How To Free Up Disk Space On Mac
You can then move the content to the cloud, then delete all previous backups on your Mac.
Method 8: Remove duplicate files
In iTunes, there’re other files you can remove to free up disk space — duplicate items.
- Open iTunes.
- Click the View tab, then select Show Duplicate Items.
iTunes will show you a list of duplicates. You can then check and remove the unneeded.
Method 9: Remove software updates
If you have updated your iPhone or iPad via iTunes on your Mac, you’ve left update file(s) on the system. After the update, these files are not needed any more, and you can follow these steps to delete them.
- Click the Finder tab > Go > Go to Folder.
- To delete iPad update files, type ~/Library/iTunes/iPad Software Updates.
- To delete iPhone update files, type ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates.
Method 10: Uninstall unneeded apps
Last but not least, you can consider removing unused applications on your Mac. It’s a great way to free up disk space.
You can use the free OS X tool AppCleaner or AppTrap to clean uninstall apps. Just drag and drop the app you want uninstalled into the tool.
Then select the files you want to be removed along with the app, and empty the trash and the uninstallation process is complete.
Just have a try now!
Feel free to leave a comment below to share your results or any other suggestions.
Today in 2021, MacBooks are more spacious than ever. The new MacBook Air comes with a 256-GB hard drive. But no amount of storage seems to be enough as the ever-inflating digital media is taking over our hard drives. Cloud servers are only a partial answer to that. They aren’t getting cheaper and consume insane amounts of the world’s electricity. So if you want to take a load off your drive and help the planet, you should teach yourself a couple of storage-keeping tricks. Let’s go.
What’s causing low disk space on your Mac?
Before you begin to free up disk space, let’s identify what’s taking it up. From the Apple Menu in the upper left-hand corner of your screen, select About This Mac and then click the Storage tab in the window that opens. You’ll get a handy, color-coded graph that looks like this:
In the above example, you can see that apps, audio files, and “other” (for details on what this “other” category consists of, look here) are taking the most significant amount of space.
It’s nice to see what’s stored on your Mac, and even nicer to be able to browse the folders that contain the files themselves. Now that you’ve identified what’s on your drive let’s free up some space.
How to increase disk space on your Mac
There are several options here, so let’s go through a few.
1. Remove large and old files
Often the files that end up taking the most space are tucked away in “cold storage” on your computer. These are big movies, photos, or the like that you rarely look at but can’t part with, either. In this case, archiving the files and moving them to an external drive is a good way to free up storage space on your Mac.
Locating huge neglected files can be a pain, but it gets super easy with the CleanMyMac X app. It has a dedicated Large & Old File finder. It will help you find massive files and sort them by size to define the largest ones quickly.
You can download the free version of CleanMyMac X here.
As the name suggests, it finds files that occupy a lot of space on your disk but haven’t been opened for a long time. You can quickly review these files right in the app and decide which ones you want to remove. It’s a really handy feature if you have a lot of heavy stuff piled up.
2. Empty Trash
Review your Trash bin’s contents one last time before you empty it. Press Command and right-click the Trash folder on your Trash icon. Then, click Empty Trash to remove everything.
Use Command-Option-Delete to delete any folder immediately, bypassing Trash.
How To Free Up Disk Space On Macbook Pro
3. Clean up the Downloads folder
Files love to hide in your Mac’s Downloads folder. Old disk images, random photos, unused extensions, ZIP files… they’re all in there, not making a sound. Hiding. ? Go to Finder and browse what’s sitting in your Downloads, wasting space on your disk. Anything unnecessary can be dragged to the Trash.
4. Delete duplicate folders and files
How many times do we copy or download things twice? Like many users, I would prefer to have a backup twin of my important files. But that often ends up in my files being quadrupled…or what do they call a 4th or 5th copy of the same folder?
To effectively remove duplicate files and make space on Mac, you can use Gemini 2. This is how this app looks.
You can download this little duplicate finder here.
Gemini 2 analyzes potential duplicates by many criteria, not just the name of the file. It searches for:
- Duplicate folders
- Duplicate movies
- Similar images
5. Learn to use Optimized Storage
Optimized Storage is the built-in feature of the macOS. It’s a sorting algorithm that shows different categories of files on your Mac for review and removal.
- Click the Apple Menu > About This Mac > Storage.
- Choose “Manage…”
By far, the most-space demanding of your files will be Applications.
Using the quick tabs above, you will decide what is there you can toss away. Make sure also to check Recommendations (on top of the list). There are a couple more space-saving options there.
6. Uninstall unused applications
If you’re like me, you often try an app “...just to see what it does”. While that’s fun, it frequently results in a slew of forgotten apps. It’s a good practice to set a reminder to review your Applications folder and clean out the ones you no longer use. However, note that simply dragging an app into your Mac’s trash doesn’t eliminate all of its related files.
CleanMyMac X's Uninstaller feature, on the other hand, leaves no leftover pieces behind, which means more available space on your Mac. CleanMyMac X finds every app-related document and file, no matter where it has been tucked away and deletes it from your Mac.
And speaking of setting up a reminder, CleanMyMac’s scheduler will handle that task for you, too. Just tell it how often you’d like to be prompted to give your Mac a good cleaning and leave the rest to the app.
7. Delete your Desktop screenshots
Mac’s Desktop is where you keep screenshots by default. With a feature called “Stacks,” you can organize your Desktop into clearly labeled folders. One of such folders will be Screenshots, which you can later remove in one sweep.
- Go to your desktop.
- Right-click somewhere in the middle of your Desktop.
- Select “Use Stacks”
Now you should see the Screenshots folder with all your screengrabs neatly stuffed inside. Drag this folder to the Trash and empty it.
8. Get rid of system junk
It’s not just your files that are hogging disk space — it’s also useless system files like logs, cache, unused binaries, old iOS backups and installers, and what not. Fortunately, CleanMyMac can find and eliminate them all to make low disk space a thing of the past, at last.
System junk is comprised of:
- User cache files
- Application cache
- Broken downloads
- Unused .DMG installers
As you can see, the 'User cache' category alone can recover about 3 GB of space. So the best way to free up space on Mac is to start with this type of files.
With just a few clicks, you’ll discover what’s where and what’s ripe for deletion. The best way to free up hard drive space is to run CleanMyMac X and wave goodbye to space-hogging files. Don’t worry. You won’t miss them. Hopefully, you managed to clear a lot of disk space — drop by for more Mac housekeeping tips. 😉