Check out Motion Array: quick tutorial on how to delete media cache files from Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. Mac OS X: How to free up hard disk space By SK 5 comments Last updated July 24, 2017 This article describes several ways to free-up space on your Mac so that you can increase available space on your computer.

The Optimised Storage features of your Mac help you save storage space by storing your content in iCloud and making it available on demand:

• When storage space is needed, files, photos, films, email attachments and other files that you rarely use are stored in iCloud automatically.
• Each file stays exactly where you last saved it, and will be downloaded when you open it.
• Files that you’ve used recently remain on your Mac, along with optimised versions of your photos.

If you haven't yet upgraded to macOS Sierra or later, learn about other ways to free up storage space.

Find out how much storage is available on your Mac

Choose Apple menu  > About This Mac, then click Storage. Each segment of the bar is an estimate of the storage space used by a category of files. Move your pointer over each segment for more detail.

Click the Manage button to open the Storage Management window, pictured below.

Manage storage on your Mac

The Storage Management window offers recommendations for optimising your storage. If some recommendations are already turned on, you will see fewer recommendations.

Store in iCloud

Click the Store in iCloud button, then choose from these options:

• Desktop and Documents. Store all files from these two locations in iCloud Drive. When storage space is needed, only the files you recently opened are kept on your Mac, so that you can easily work offline. Files stored only in iCloud display a download icon , which you can double-click to download the original file. Learn more about this feature.
  
• Photos. Store all original, full-resolution photos and videos in iCloud Photos. When storage space is needed, only space-saving (optimised) versions of photos are kept on your Mac. To download the original photo or video, just open it.
  
• Messages. Store all messages and attachments in iCloud. When storage space is needed, only the messages and attachments you recently opened are kept on your Mac. Learn more about Messages in iCloud.

Storing files in iCloud uses the storage space in your iCloud storage plan. If you reach or exceed your iCloud storage limit, you can either buy more iCloud storage or make more iCloud storage available. iCloud storage starts at 50GB for US$0.99 a month, and you can purchase additional storage directly from your Apple device. Find out more about prices in your region.

Optimise Storage

Click the Optimise button to save space by automatically removing films and TV shows you've watched. When storage space is needed, films or TV shows that you've purchased from Apple and have already watched will be removed from your Mac. Click the download icon next to a film or TV show to download it again.

Your Mac will also save space by only keeping recent email attachments on this Mac when storage space is needed. You can manually download any attachments at any time by opening the email or attachment, or saving the attachment to your Mac.

Optimising storage for films, TV shows and email attachments doesn't require iCloud storage space.

Empty Bin Automatically

Empty Bin Automatically permanently deletes files that have been in the Bin for more than 30 days.

Reduce Clutter

Reduce Clutter helps you identify large files and files you might no longer need. Click the Review Files button, then choose any of the file categories in the sidebar, such as Applications, Documents, Music Creation or Bin.

You can delete the files in some categories directly from this window. Other categories show the total storage space used by the files in each app. You can then open the app and decide whether to delete files from within it.

Find out how to redownload apps, music, films, TV shows and books.

Where to find the settings for each feature

The button for each recommendation in the Storage Management window affects one or more settings in other apps. You can also control those settings directly within each app.

• If you're using macOS Catalina or later, choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, click Apple ID, then select iCloud in the sidebar: Store in iCloud turns on the Optimise Mac Storage setting on the right. To turn off iCloud Drive entirely, untick iCloud Drive.
• If you're using macOS Mojave or earlier, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click iCloud, then click Options next to iCloud Drive. Store in iCloud turns on the Desktop & Documents Folders and Optimise Mac Storage settings.
• In Photos, choose Photos > Preferences, then click iCloud. Store in iCloud selects iCloud Photos and Optimise Mac Storage.
• In Messages, choose Messages > Preferences, then click iMessage. Store in iCloud selects Enable Messages in iCloud.

• If you're using macOS Catalina or later, open the Apple TV app, choose TV > Preferences from the menu bar, then click Files. Optimise Storage selects “Automatically delete watched films and TV shows'.
• If you're using macOS Mojave or earlier, open iTunes, choose iTunes > Preferences from the menu bar, then click Advanced. Optimise Storage selects “Automatically delete watched films and TV shows”.
• In Mail, choose Mail > Preferences from the menu bar, then click Accounts. In the Account Information section on the right, Optimise Storage sets the Download Attachments menu to either Recent or None.

Empty Bin Automatically: From the Finder, choose Finder > Preferences, then click Advanced. Empty Bin Automatically selects “Remove items from the Bin after 30 days”.

Other ways that macOS helps automatically save space

With macOS Sierra or later, your Mac will automatically take these additional steps to save storage space:

• Detects duplicate downloads in Safari, keeping only the most recent version of the download
• Reminds you to delete used app installers
• Removes old fonts, languages and dictionaries that aren't being used
• Clears caches, logs and other unnecessary data when storage space is needed

How to free up storage space manually

Even without using the Optimised Storage features described in this article, you can take other steps to make more storage space available:

• Music, films and other media can use a lot of storage space. Learn how to delete music, films and TV shows from your device.
• Delete other files that you no longer need by moving them to the Bin, then emptying the Bin. The Downloads folder is good place to look for files that you might no longer need.
• Move files to an external storage device.
• Compress files.
• Delete unneeded email: In the Mail app, choose Mailbox > Erase Junk Mail. If you no longer need the email in your mailbox, choose Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items.

Learn more

• The Storage pane of About This Mac is the best way to determine the amount of storage space available on your Mac. Disk Utility and other apps may display storage categories, such as Not Mounted, VM, Recovery, Other Volumes, Other, Free or Purgeable. Don't rely on these categories to understand how to free up storage space or how much storage space is available for your data.
• When you duplicate a file on an APFS-formatted volume, that file won't use additional storage space on the volume. Deleting a duplicate file frees up only the space required by any data you might have added to the duplicate. If you no longer need any copies of the file, you can recover all of the storage space by deleting both the duplicate and the original file.
• If you're using a pro app and Optimise Mac Storage, learn how to make sure that your projects are always on your Mac and able to access their files.

Despite my MacBook Air having a 120GB hard-drive, I am always struggling to keep enough storage space free. Everytime I look at my available space, I am always hovering around 15-20GB.

Which you might think is no small amount, but when it drops below 10GB, the computer starts throwing up continual boot error messages.

How To Free Up Space On Mac Computer

Ever since I bought my first MacBook back in 2012, I havetried various methods of keeping the computer as clean as possible. Here arethe tried and tested methods I came up with. Some are obvious while others arenot.

Find YourBiggest Files

The first step is to find your biggest space hoggers.

Some things will be self-evident. If you use iMovie forexample, video files you’re currently working on will take up a tremendousamount of space. If you download music from iTunes, all those m4a files will betaking up a lot of space. If you use the Photos app, the photo library islikely to hog up a lot of space.

The iMovie library is in the “Movies” folder and mine is currently 12GB in size (right-click onthe file and choose “Get Info” to seeits size). iTunes media, including music and movies, is in the “Music” folder (another 15GB). The photosdatabase is naturally in “Pictures”.

The best solution for things like iMovie and iTunes is simplyto move the folders to a large USB stick or attached portable drive and pointthe apps to the new locations.

Sort Files By Size

The next step is sort all of your hard-drive files according to size. To do this, open the Finder then in the top menu, select Go then Recents. If you don’t see recents, click on All My Files.

This then shuffles all of your files together. If you had to click All My Files, click the icon with three horizontal lines to show the files as a list.

Click Size in the header until the biggest file appears at the top. Note, this list does NOT include apps and system files. If you don’t see Size, just right-click in any of the column headers (kind, name, etc) and select Size.

If you right-click on one of the files, you can delete it. Or if you want to see which folder it is in first, right-click on it and select Show in Enclosing Folder.

There are apps which do all of this large file sorting for you, such as the free OmniDiskSweeper. But after trying it out, I’ve concluded it doesn’t do much more than what I have described above.

Delete AllUnneeded Files Or Move Them Off The Computer

The next step is to go on a big deleting purge.

Focus on areas where lots of files tend to accumulate. Thisis usually the Downloads folder, the Desktop, and the Trash bin. Deleteeverything you don’t need and empty the Trash. Right there, you are likely tonotice a big improvement in space.

Next, throw everything you want to keep into one folder.Next, get a large 128GB USB stick or a portable hard drive and transfereverything off the computer.

Use SelectiveSync On Cloud Storage

If you don’t want to use a USB stick or portable drive – oryou still want to be able to effortlessly bring back files to the MacOScomputer – then cloud storage is a solid choice. But to save space on yourcomputer, you need to use a feature called “SelectiveSync”.

Selective Sync is offered by all of the major cloud storage platforms, including the one I use (Sync.com). This is where all of your files are uploaded to the website of the cloud storage service, but in the desktop app settings, you can choose which of the files are synced to your computer.

So in the Sync.com desktop app preferences, I can uncheck theboxes of the folders I want off the computer but they will remain in my onlineaccount. Dropbox and Google Drive have this option too in their preferences.

UninstallUnneeded Apps – Properly

Uninstalling apps is much easier on a Mac than it is onWindows. With a Mac, you simply have to drop the app into the Trash bin anddelete it.

How To Clean My Macbook Hard Drive

The trouble is, like Windows, this does not completely uninstall it. Temp files areoften left behind, building up a huge amount of crud that, over time,accumulates and takes up valuable space.

This is why I love the free AppCleaner.

With AppCleaner, you can either drag the app file ontoAppCleaner and it will hunt down all of the associated files for you to deleteat the same time.

Or you can set it so you can send the app file to the Trashand AppCleaner immediately opens by itself with all the related crud for you tonuke.

AppCleaner can also tell you how much space each app istaking up so you can decide if it is worth deleting it to make space.

And you can also remove widgets and plugins, which won’t giveback THAT much space, but every bit counts.

Disk Cleaner

Stop InstallingApps If There Is a Browser Version

A lot of popular apps actually now have equally good – if notbetter – web versions. This removes the need to install the desktop versions,which will save you space in the long run.

For example, LibreOffice takes up about 4GB of space on my computer. But if I were to uninstall it and use Google Docs instead, I will get that 4GB back and all the space that LibreOffice files would have taken up.

Also, be sure to read our sister-site article on how to use some web apps like desktop apps, thereby getting the best of both worlds.

Other apps which have good web versions include :

How Do I Free Up Space On My Mac Computer

• Mail (switch to web-based email instead).

Empty The iOSBackup Folder

If you are in the habit of using iTunes to backup your iOS devices to your Mac, you may want to consider deleting the iOS backup folder. When I checked it yesterday, it was almost 21GB, going back months!

To find the folder, go to Finder, then Gothen Go To Folder.

In the box that comes up, type the following :

Delete the box that comes up. Just remember to make a new iOS backup again immediately afterwards or backup to iCloud.

Conclusion

Erase Free Space Macbook

These are the things I do on a weekly basis to ensure thecomputer is as clean as possible. Every six months, I go one step further andcompletely reformat the computer, which is something I will be covering in anarticle very soon.