- How To Clean My Macbook Hard Drive
- How To Free Up Space On Mac
- Erase Free Space Macbook
- How To Free Up Other Space On Mac
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. Clears caches, logs and other unnecessary data when storage space is needed; Free Up Storage On Mac How to free up storage space manually. Even without using the Optimised Storage features of Sierra or later, you can take other steps to make more storage space available: Storage Apps For Mac Os. Music, films and other media can use a lot of. The “Other” category in the About This Mac window may sometimes be big. However, this isn’t always a problem. But if you’re running low on storage space on your Mac, there are ways to fix the “Other” category from taking up so much space. Here is how: How to remove “other” data in macOS and OS X Easy steps to delete other data.
How to Clean Your Mac's Hard Disk Drive?
SSD (Solid State Drives) is fast, stable, and offers great performance. Unfortunately, compared to HDDs (Hard Disk Drives), the capacity-to-cost ratio is not good. There are, however, methods to free up hard drives to obtain additional capacity for computer systems, including the macOS.
Certain data and files are important, and you will not want to delete or move them. However, some files are redundant and can be removed without consequences. If you know which files you can safely delete, you can free up this space. Although the Windows operating system is known for inefficient clutter, the macOS also produces unnecessary files that take valuable disk space. In this article, we describe some methods on how to clean macOS disk space.
Video showing How to Obtain Free Space on Your Mac's Drive
Table of Contents:
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Inspect the drive to ensure that the system is running out of free space
Some issues relating to lack of storage might be difficult to determine and can even be a result of fake error logs. So, first, ensure that the system is, in fact, running out of free space. There are two methods to check available space on a hard drive:
1. Access the Apple menu and select About this Mac. Choose the Storage tab.
2. More detailed information can be found within the Disk Utility feature, which is located in the Applications folder under Utilities. Once Disk Utility is launched, select the drive connected to the Mac.
Begin by cleaning Trash
Once you are sure that the drive is actually full, the next step is to simply clean the computer (as if you were cleaning your home: you empty the trash). Open the Finder menu and choose Empty Trash. Bear in mind that some applications, such as Mail, iMovie, iPhoto, and others, have their own Trash. To clean those apps, follow the steps below:
1. Click Mailbox and choose Erase Deleted Items.
2. Select In All Account and Mailbox.
3. Finally click Erase Junk.
Alternatively, to avoid permanently losing your files, choose to archive your emails by following the steps below.
iPhoto
1. Click on iPhoto from the menu at the top of the screen.
2. Choose Empty iPhoto Trash.
iMovie
1. Click on File from the menu on top of your screen.
2. Select Move to Trash or File.
3. Then choose Move Rejected Clipsto Trash.
Clear unnecessary Downloads
The Downloads folder stores all files downloaded from the Internet. Often, these are forgotten after use and continue to use storage space. This is an excellent area to address when looking to free up space on your drive. Delete all redundant Download files.
1. Open Finder.
2. In the sidebar, choose the Downloads folder. Disk image (.dmg) files commonly occupy the most unused storage space.
Remove unused applications
Unused apps in isolation might not take up a great deal of space, but the amount of hard drive storage used by them collectively can be significant. Furthermore, removing apps on Macs is simple, especially those installed through App Store.
1. To delete them, open Launchpad.
2. Click and hold the program's icon you wish to remove.
3. When the icon starts to animate, click the Delete (x) button.
4. To delete any other app, drag the icon to Trash and then empty Trash.
Make space without losing any data
The best way to gain extra space on the Mac is to move non-executable files such as photos, movies, documents, and any large files, to add external storage, for example, an external drive, USB drive, DVD/CD drive, or cloud storage.
Compress large items
Another method to obtain some free space is to compress files. Compressed files remain on the computer but occupy less space. On the other hand, this can be less efficient than deleting or moving files to external storage. To find the largest files on the drive, follow the steps below:
1. Open Finder from the sidebar.
2. Select the Device (the label you provided) and type criteria into the search field.
3. When your search location appears (for example, This Mac), click the Add (+) button.
4. Click the first drop-down menu, and choose Other.
5. Find the logical size option, enable it, and then click OK.
6. Choose the 'is greater than' condition and type the amount (i.e., 50 Mb).
7. To compress items, right-click or hold Control and left-click it, and then select the Compress 'name' Win 10 iso. option.
If you are using an earlier version of macOS:
1. Click Go from the Finder menu and select Home.
2. Choose File, click Find and open the Find menu.
3. Find the File size option.
4. Choose the 'is greater than' condition and type the amount (i.e., 50 Mb).
5. To compress items, right-click or hold Control and left-click it, and then select the Compress 'name' option.
6. To archive, your emails, open the Mail application and select a folder you wish to archive (e.g., Inbox).
7. Drag it to the desktop. Harvard simulation answers. The mbox folder will appear on your desktop.
8. Right-click it or use the Control and left-click combination, and select Compress 'Inbox.mbox'.
9. Now you can delete your messages from Mail.
Delete unnecessary temporary files, system caches, and logs
System stores several System logs and temporary files - deleting them will increase the available space on your drive. To clean the system from this type of file, we recommendCombo Cleaneror other third-party applications.
Clear the browser cache storage
Browsers store website data such as cookies and cache information. Cleaning these hidden files might free up storage space. To clean up Safari, simply click Safari on the menu at the top of the screen and select Clear History. Browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox can be cleaned similarly.
I have a confession to make: I am really good at managing my storage space. Full disclosure: on my private devices. I would go for an 8GB iPhone if there was one, as I don’t have many apps and games installed, and I’m not a huge photo nerd.
That sadly doesn’t translate to my work from my private life. I’m not lucky enough to have a work computer and a private computer — like I have two smartphones — and this is where it becomes a problem. A storage problem.
Emails, attachments, documents, pictures, backups, drafts, sheets, videos pile up really fast. You know it gets serious the moment you realize that anything you want to delete in order to free up storage space is absolutely necessary to hold on to. Like someone lost at sea gasping for air, you’re desperately trying to find those extra megabytes and gigs (if you’re lucky) to get you going for another month or so.
What is Other in Mac storage?
Some of you might know this, most of you might not. When you’re analyzing your Mac storage, macOS visually represents stuff that’s eating space up. You might see color-coded bars for Documents, Apps, Mail, Photos, and System, but there’s a sizeable chunk labeled Other, represented in gloomy dark gray.
It usually tends to be rather big, in some cases among the biggest space wasters on your Mac. What is it?
To put it simply, macOS puts all files which don’t fall under the aforementioned categories inside the Other storage. These files can vary in type and can be anything from temporary files to macOS system files, plugins, extensions, archive (zip) files, and even documents like PDFs, docs, or Photoshop files.
Often times you can come across files you don’t even recognize neither by name nor by type, but you realize it weighs several hundred megs, enough to get rid of that low space notification for a day or two.
Where is the Other Storage on Mac?
You are right to ask this question because Other Storage is hidden from you. Why? Because this Other Storage can, and it most likely does, contain critical files that can break some apps, and, in some instances, your Mac.
If you fire up Finder, click Go in the menu, and go to~/Library/Caches
, that’s where you find your Other Storage. All those folders make up your Other Storage, and take up all that space.
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How To Clean My Macbook Hard Drive
How to delete Other Storage on Mac
Well, there’s a hard (and risky) way, and there’s an easy way.
The risky way first requires you to identify or find large Other Storage files. While the process is fairly simple, the challenge is knowing what’s safe to delete and what’s not.
How To Free Up Space On Mac
Follow these steps to find files:
- Press Command-F on your Desktop;
- Select This Mac on the top left next to Search;
- Click the dropdown menu field under Search, and select Other;
- In the Search Attributes list, check File Size and File Extension;
- Here you can instruct Search what type of file (PDF, Photoshop, etc.) to look for, and what size threshold to report beyond (works best if you choose “greater than”).
Carefully review the results and delete accordingly.
Erase Free Space Macbook
Kambi novels pdf download. …or you can do this the easy way, with Macpaw’s CleanMyMac X. The steps are easy and safe:
- Download and install CleanMyMac X;
- Chose the option Large and Old files, towards the bottom of the list on the left, and hit Scan;
- The software categorizes everything it deems worthy to be part of the list, so you can easily go through categories and files;
- Delete the files you no longer need.
Pro tip: Sort results by size to be more efficient in deleting one larger file rather than 10 smaller ones.
CleanMyMac X can also help you get rid of temporary files and caches that are safe to delete in order to free up space while keeping your Mac in top-notch shape. The procedure is similar but, this time, you select the System Junk from the list, hit Scan, and let it do its job. Once the scan is complete, you just hit Clear and you’re done! We’ve detailed this in a previous article you can read here.
How To Free Up Other Space On Mac
Not just an effective Mac cleaner
CleanMyMac X also offers the option to delete other files, like browser extensions, disk images, installation files, etc. It offers an all-around solution to reclaim space on your Mac.
Not only that, but the software offers Malware removal, a Privacy checkup, optimizations, maintenance, pretty much a Swiss army knife to keep your Mac happy.
Remember: just as it is important to clean your Mac on the outside, it’s also important to clean your Mac on the inside. If gaining back that performance and wasted storage space come along as a side effect (and they will), you’re winning!
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