20 Ways To Free Up Disk Space On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. If your hard drive is full let me show you where to look to clear up some space.

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So if your hard drive is full and you want to quickly clear up some space there are plenty of places to look to clear out some files that you probably don't need. First let's start off in the Media Apps. In the TV App if you go under Library to either Movies or TV Shows you'll see a list of videos that you have. Now a lot of these may not be downloaded. If you move your pointer over one you'll see a little Cloud icon indicating that you own this movie but you don't have it currently downloaded to this Mac. So it's not taking up space. But if you don't see this here, that means the movie is using space on your drive and you can click here. Instead of Download you'll see the option to remove it. Better yet there's an easier way to see these. You can go to what I call the Storage Manager. We're going to use that a lot here.  

Go to the Apple Menu and About This Mac. Then you click on Storage at the top and click on Manage. Now you have some easy access to get rid of some things here on the left. So let's go to TV. This is going to show you a list of everything you've got downloaded. You click here to sort it by size and you can select one to delete it. It's a really easy way to do it. You don't even have to open the TV App. 

So next let's go to Podcasts. In Podcasts if you go to Downloaded on the left it's going to show you all of the podcasts you currently have downloaded and you can click here on the three dots and remove downloads. But like with TV you can go to the Storage Manager here, the same way, but instead go to Podcasts. Now you can see all of your Podcasts here. You can sort by size and you could put the largest on top. Then you could select one, click Delete to delete it. You could also Shift Click to select a range or Command A to select All and delete and clear off a lot of space. Of course it's easy to go back into the Podcast App and redownload podcasts. Just like you can reload TV shows and movies that you purchased later on. You don't have to store them on your Mac. 

So the third place to look is Books. In Books there's no downloaded section here. But if you go to Library, All you'll notice some of the books have a Cloud icon there meaning that you don't currently have them downloaded and other do not. You can click and remove like that. But the Storage Manager also has a Books here on the left. You can see which ones that you've got. You can Sort them. You can select one or many and Delete. Now let's look at some other places. 

GarageBand has to store a lot of audio data on your drive. Now if you rarely ever used GarageBand or maybe you just used it once to play around with it and right now it's not important. If you need to clear up some space you could do so by getting rid of a lot of GarageBand data. So go to the Computer Level in the Finder. Then go in your hard drive down to Library and in there are a few places here where you find GarageBand content. First let's look in Application Support. Under that I can find GarageBand. I can do Command i and see that this is a pretty sizable folder here. So if I'm not going to use GarageBand I can just delete that folder. But a lot of GarageBand stuff is actually filed under Logic. Logic is another app that Apple has that's the more pro level music app. So you could find those here and you could see that this one could be even bigger. So if you don't have Logic and you're not planning on using GarageBand you can get rid of this as well. But there's even more because outside of Application Support in Audio you usually find Apple Loops and Apple Loops Index. Apple Loops are bits of sound that are used in GarageBand and Logic. You can get rid of those two folders as well to save space. Now if you want you could go back to the Storage Manager, like before, and then you can select Music Creation. You could see there is a button here Remove GarageBand Sound Library. This will get rid of some but perhaps not all of those files. So you may want to start with this and then go and check those four locations. 

Now another app that may take up a lot of space on your drive beside the App itself is Xcode. Xcode is Apple's developer tool and if you've ever just downloaded it to play around with it, maybe to learn some new skills, but you're not using it day-to-day as a developer you may want to get rid of Xcode and all of it's supporting files to save some space. So when trying to get rid of some of the files from Xcode where you want to look first is in the Storage Manager. Look under Developer. Then you're going to see all these different things. If you're not using Xcode changes are you don't need any of these. But even if you are you may want to get rid of some of the older iOS versions if you're not testing on those. Same thing for Watch or sometimes TV OS versions will be here as well. Then you could look for Xcode Caches, Project Archives, and Project to build data and indexes. You can delete any of these. You can also Shift Click to select multiple ones and Delete. Even if you're done with those go into your User Folder, into Library, using the Option Go Menu there. Then go to Developer and then Xcode. Then look for User Data here and IBSupport. Then you'll see simulator devices here. If those haven't been cleared out already you can clear some of those out as well. Then back at the Xcode level look for Drive Data and you can get rid of stuff left over from some of your projects there if it's not needed. These will be regenerated if you work with those projects again. 

At the top level in the Library folder there, so not in your User Folder but the main Library Folder, look under Developer and then you're going to see Course Simulator. You'll see some profiles, runtimes, and things under that. If you see anything there you may want to get rid of it if it wasn't already gotten rid of. This is iOS 13 runtime. I don't need that so I can get rid of that. You find those in Xcode Preferences and then Components and then you can see it right here. You just can't delete them from here but you can easily redownload them. 

Now another thing you may have on your drive are some old iPhone or iPad backups. You're probably not using iCloud to backup those devices but maybe sometime in the past you backed them up to your Mac and those files are still lying around and they can be huge. Now the easiest way to find those is to go into the Storage Manager just as before because doing the Finder you'd have to connect each device and then go to Manage to backup those devices. But here you can actually look for iOS files here on the left. You can select those and you'll get a list of all your old backups. You can select and Delete them. There used to be time also where you would update our iPhones and iPads through out Macs or maybe you still do it that way. You've got those files lying around. If you go to the Library Folder there holding down the Option Key and then you look for iTunes here and in there you may see some of these old iOS updates. Of course you can delete those. Your iPhone and iPad are probably way past those updates and you could just update those devices directly now. You don't have to go through your Mac. 

Now in the Library Folder there's a folder called Application Support. If you go into that you get folders for different apps that want to store parts of the app itself, different libraries, in here. So let's go and sort these by size. Now the problem is folders sizes aren't shown. To show folder sizes you want to go to View, Show View Options, and turn on Calculate All Sizes. We're going to use that technique a lot. Then wait for it to calculate everything. Then you could see which apps may be taking up a lot of space. What you want to look for here are not apps that you are currently using. You don't want to disable those by removing their things here. But maybe an app that you're no longer using. Maybe one you stopped using awhile ago or an old version of an app that you're no longer using. Then you can get rid of those. You also want to go to the computer level and then into Library here and do the same thing under Application Support. Sort by Size, Show View Options, Calculate All Sizes, and see what's taking up a lot of space. So Adobe has got quite a bit of stuff as well. Then most of the rest of the stuff down here is too small to worry about. 

Now once you go back to the top level and look in System. Now System is protected. You can't change what's in there. But I want you to take a look and see how much space your voices are taking up. These are the voices used for text to speech or for Siri. So you go into System and then into Library and then you're going to look in two places. One is Speech. Get information on Speech to see how big it is. That's 1G. Also go to the top and you'll see Assets V2. Go in there and then turn on Calculate All Sizes.  Sort By Size and see what seems to be Speech. You could see here Voice Services. So that's a voice as well. Mac Can Talk voice assets. That's something as well. So you can see about 3G there. So 4G total. So you may want to deal with this by getting rid of some of the voices. The way to do that is to go into System Preferences and then to Accessibility and then to Spoken Content. You're going to see System Voice here. Now select that and go to Customize. Then you'll see checks next to all the voices that you currently have loaded. Maybe at some point you went through and checked a whole bunch of these thinking it would be fun to play around with some of the voices. But now you want that space back. So what you want to do is uncheck any you don't think you'll need. The Siri voices are the largest ones. So you want to kind of figure out which of the four Siri voices that you want. Save that one and get rid of the other three. I would keep around a few like Samantha and probably Alex. They are some default ones. They are really small anyway. Those older voices. Then you could click OK and it will get rid of those voices. Again you can't change the System folder here. So the only way to do it is using System Preferences and customizing the voices. 

Now usually when people talk about clearing out space on a drive they talk about caches. Getting rid of the caches. Clearing out the caches. But most of the time you don't want to do that. The whole point of a cache is to speed things up for you. It's to take files that you're going to need all the time, either stuff that's from online or stuff generated by apps, and have them there ready to go. Clearing out the cache; all that's going to do is slow you down the next time you use that app. It's going to regenerate them anyway. So it won't save you space. It will just make things slower and it could eat up your bandwidth if it has to redownload those. But, they still are worth checking out. Go to your Library folder here and then look for Caches. Go into there. Do a sort by size and just like before Calculate all Sizes so you can see the folders mixed in there. See what you've got. For instance, here's a perfect example. I'm now using Screenflow 10. Screenflow 9 has a cache in here. I'm no longer using it. I'm never going to run it again and it left behind this cache. So I can delete this cache and get rid of that. So willy-nilly go through this. Just look at the largest things. Think about if you really need those or not and delete them if you don't think you'll need them again or anytime soon. 

Now if you've gotten some images with attachments in Messages, and who hasn't, they can take up a lot of space. So you can go into Messages and if you see one you can Control Click on it and you can Delete it. But you're not going to scroll back through all your conversations to find the largest ones and delete them. Instead go into the Storage Manager, just like before, and if you have more than just a few images and other attachments you should see Messages appear here on the left, and you could select it and then sort through it just like you could the podcasts and books and TV shows. 

Now how about your photos? They take up a lot of space, right. Well, go to Photos, Preferences and then look under General. Then you'll see Library Location. So you want to pay attention to that. That's where all your stuff is stored. You can actually click on it to jump to it and here you can see it's in my Home folder under Pictures. That's usually where you'll find it and this is usually what it will be named. I can select that do Command i and it will show me the size of it. So you can determine whether or not this is something you need to worry about. Now if it is pretty big there are a few things you can do. One is that you can go in Photos, Preferences, again, to iCloud and turn on iCloud Photos. Now yes this means it will upload all your photos to iCloud, and Yes you'll probably have to pay for storage. $3 a month or something like that. But what will happen is it will off-load the photos that are the oldest, the ones that you haven't viewed very often, and put those in iCloud and it won't take up space on your Mac. You have to Optimize Mac Storage turned On for that space saving to happen. In addition to that you get to have all your photos available on your iPhone, your iPad, maybe your other Mac as well. It's kind of a nice feeling that your photos aren't just on your Mac and maybe your backup drive that's sitting next to it. That they are somewhere else in case there's a disaster that takes out those two things. But do note you don't see the savings right away. It will take time for everything to upload and for some of the older, less viewed photos to be off-loaded. So they are only here on demand not stored on the drive. 

Now another thing you can do is you can get rid of videos from this. So, I don't like to store my videos inside my Photos App. I like to put them elsewhere. So if you have some videos in there it's just a matter of selecting them and then you can do File, Export, Export Unmodified Original For this many videos. Then you can Save those out. Then name them something nice. Put them in a nice folder organization somewhere, maybe on an external drive even. Now the main thing you can do with your iPhone's camera is take short videos. You probably don't want to do this. You want to have your videos there for you to see in your Photos Library. But if you're like me and mostly take photos and only occasionally do videos then this might be a good option and a great way to save space because videos take up a lot more space than photos do.

Now another you may want to do is look for old photos libraries. Maybe you duplicated your Photos Library at one point as a backup or maybe you created a separate one for something special at some point. In the Finder do a Search and search for .photoslibrary. Then use Name Contains That. Then have it search This Mac. It will come up with any old photos libraries that maybe you can get rid of. You can select it and hopefully you remember why it's there and what's in it based on its location. Also search for .iphoto. It will find any old iPhoto Libraries from before the transition from iPhoto to Photos. As a matter of fact a lot of people when they transitioned they left their old iPhoto Library around for awhile just to make sure everything was okay. Maybe you forgot about it and now that you know everything is fine you can get rid of that old library that's way out of date. 

Another place you may want to look is your Downloads folder. You can find that by going to Go, and then Downloads and this is, of course, where you downloaded things either in Safari, another browser, maybe Mail. A lot of times people forget they put things here and this could really add up. The best practice is to, of course, download something to your Downloads folder and either use it right away, like it's an installer, or put it in its proper place in your Documents folder or wherever, so nothing accumulates. But if you've let things accumulate maybe deal with each one of those items now and clear out your Downloads folder. 

Of course another place to look is the Trash. You can get to it in the Dock by just clicking on it and it takes you to the Trash Folder. Now the Trash Folder is just a safety net. It's meant to be a temporary storage place and then you could Delete the files in it later on. You should never put anything in the Trash that you're not willing to have deleted immediately. So if you practice that and now you notice your Trash is pretty full because you haven't emptied it for awhile, empty your Trash. Go to Finder, Empty Trash, and get rid of everything. If this is becoming a problem for you, having your Trash full of files for you to empty them, you can go into the Storage Manager. If you look under Recommendations you'll see Empty Trash Automatically. You can turn that On with a button here and any file that's older than 30 days will be deleted. 

Now, of course, some of the biggest files on your drive are probably in your Applications folder. You go to the Applications Folder, go into List View and then Sort By Size. You do want to turn on Calculate All Sizes because sometimes applications are stored in little folders. Now you could see which applications take up the most space. Sometimes they are things you don't need anymore. Like maybe a game that you've finished. Now you can get rid of. To delete an app the best way to do it is to go into Launchpad. Click and hold any icon and then click the X to delete the app. This is the cleanest way to do it. Some apps you won't see that because they are System apps. You can't delete those and other apps you won't see them because they weren't installed by the Mac App Store. In that case you should find out from the developer what the proper way to uninstall the app is. Usually it's something simple like dragging the application from the Application Folder to the Trash. But for some apps it's more complex like there's an Uninstaller App that they want you to run or process they want you to follow. It depends on the developer. 

Now if you want you can look for large email messages and delete those as well. So go to whatever folder holds all your email messages. It's usually for gmail or iCloud. It's like an Archive Folder. Or you may have arranged things in different folders. Usually it's something like Archive. But you can also select multiple folders like that. It will show you the contents of all those folders. So now you've got a list of basically all of your old emails. Then go to View, Sort By Size, then you'll see the largest email message at the top. Maybe something that has a huge attachment. You can delete it and save a bunch of space. Although in most cases you're not going to find an email that's really worth your time deleting just that one message. 

So now we get to your files. After you've looked everywhere else it basically comes down to your files. Those can be stored in many different places. But one thing you may want to do before you start digging down is to see if there's any big file out there that you can get rid of. So go to a Finder Search, like this, and change Kind to File Size. You may actually have to look under Other to do a search for File Size and select it there. Then do File Size is greater than and something like 100 megs. Then change the search area from Documents, or wherever you started, into This Mac. It will find all of the biggest files that you've got on your drive. If there's something you don't need anymore you may want to get rid of it. You can actually throw something directly into the Trash from here by selecting it and then dragging it to the Trash or Command Delete and put it in the Trash. But a lot of times the big things aren't individual files. They may be a folder filled with files. So how do you figure out what's taking up a lot of space. Well, you need to go to one of two places to see all your documents. One is your User Folder and the other is iCloud Drive. You can Go and then Go To your User Folder called Home and that's where you'll see things. You may see your Documents and Desktop folders here as well depending upon your Settings. If not you'll still see things like Movies, Music, Pictures, and such. iCloud Drive will give you all your iCloud Drive folders including things like documents and such. Now you want to Sort By Size and you want to turn On, Calculate All Sizes. Then you'll see what's taking up space. 

So here it's obvious that the main thing is Documents. I can dig down by opening this up. Then I could dig down further and continue to look down and see what's taking up a lot of space. You're basically taking an inventory here. You're looking through everything and trying to figure out what's using up a lot of space. If my Documents folder was 50 GB in size, I'm going to want to quickly dig down and find out what's using the bulk of those 50 gigs. There's really no substitute for doing this. I know a lot of people are going to recommend cleaning apps and such but you want to go through and really understand what you've got here. Not only to find files you don't need anymore and get rid of them but perhaps to clean up your organization so in the future you don't end up with a full drive not knowing what's taking up space. 

So here's a bonus one called Time Machine Local Snapshots. You're not going to find that anywhere on your drive no matter where you look. What they are are Time Machine Backups saved to your local drive. Say you have a MacBook, you have a Time Machine Drive, and you're backing up to that Time Machine Drive. But then you disconnect the drive and now you're traveling with your MacBook. It's still going to make those backups and it's going to use empty space on your drive to do it. Then when you connect the Time Machine Drive the next time it's going to take all those backups and move them to the Drive. So you didn't miss a backup even though the Drive wasn't connected. However, if you haven't connected your Drive for a long time it could eat up a lot of space on the Drive so the available space is less. You can get rid of Local Snapshots one of two ways. One is simply connect the Time Machine Drive, maybe you just forgot to do it for awhile. Now once it's connected let it do its backup. Leave it alone for awhile. Perhaps overnight and it should have everything backed up and the Local Snapshots are gone and you have more available space. If for some reason you really can't do that and you need to clean up space you can go into System Preferences and then go to Time Machine and then see where it says Back Up Automatically. Turn that Off. If you turn that Off it's going to leave all the Local Snapshots but it's going to take a few minutes to do it. So give it a few minutes and then turn it back On. What I would do is come back maybe a hour later to turn it back On or turn it back On when you next connect your Time Machine Drive. That will clear out all the Local Snapshots after a few minutes and make more available space. As I said for most people it's not a problem especially if your Time Machine Drive is always connected.

So there you go. There are a ton of places to look for extra files and things that could be taking up space on your hard drive. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.