Old disk images, random photos, unused extensions, ZIP files… they’re all in there, not making a sound. Clean up the Downloads folderįiles love to hide in your Mac’s Downloads folder. Use Command-Option-Delete to delete any folder immediately, bypassing Trash. Then, click Empty Trash to remove everything. Press Command and right-click the Trash folder on your Trash icon. Review your Trash bin’s contents one last time before you empty it. It’s a really handy feature if you have a lot of heavy stuff piled up. You can quickly review these files right in the app and decide which ones you want to remove. You can download the free version of CleanMyMac X here.Īs the name suggests, it finds files that occupy a lot of space on your disk but haven’t been opened for a long time. It will help you find massive files and sort them by size to define the largest ones quickly. It has a dedicated Large & Old File finder. Locating huge neglected files can be a pain, but it gets super easy with the CleanMyMac X app. 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. These are big movies, photos, or the like that you rarely look at but can’t part with, either.

Often the files that end up taking the most space are tucked away in “cold storage” on your computer. There are several options here, so let’s go through a few. Now that you’ve identified what’s on your drive let’s free up some 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. 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. You’ll get a handy, color-coded graph that looks like this:

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. What’s causing low disk space on your Mac?īefore you begin to free up disk space, let’s identify what’s taking it up. 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. They aren’t getting cheaper and consume insane amounts of the world’s electricity. Cloud servers are only a partial answer to that. But no amount of storage seems to be enough as the ever-inflating digital media is taking over our hard drives. The new MacBook Air comes with a 256-GB hard drive. Today in 2021, MacBooks are more spacious than ever. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here's a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

How to free up space on mac harddrive