Finding the Largest Files On Your Mac

A quick search in the Finder will show you the largest files on your Mac or in a specific location on your Mac. But you may be better off using a special system utility that will show you large files and other items taking up a lot of space. Once you locate large files you can delete the or archive them to an external drive to free up space on your Mac's hard drive.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to find the largest files on your Mac. 
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So there are a lot of reasons you may want to search for the largest files on your Mac. Maybe you need to quickly free up space and you figure the best way to do that is to find a couple files you don't need and delete them. Maybe you want to do spring cleaning and you figure the largest files are the best place to start. Or maybe you're just having a contest with a friend to see who has the largest files on their Mac. Who am I to judge. So there are two methods you can use.
One is to just look in the Finder. You can do a Finder search by file size and then sort to see which files are the largest. But for typical Mac users it's probably best to use a special system utility. I'm going to show you both methods.
To find your largest files in using the Finder first it's a good idea to create a new finder window. That way you could size it for what you want. So make it pretty much fill the screen because you'll need a lot of space. Then go to File, Find or just use Command F. Then you can ignore the Search box up here and go directly to the Modifications right there. The criteria for the search. Change Kind to File Size. Change equals to is greater than and then enter a pretty large number here. So as an example I'll do 100 MB and this will show me files that are larger than 100 MB.
Now I want to change the Search domain or the search area. It'll be the current folder that you're looking at but you want to change it to This Mac. That's going to show you all the files on the Mac that are greater than 100 MB. The next thing you want to do is you want to make sure you click on Size here. So make sure it's sorted by size. Make sure you see this little arrow pointing down here. If you see it pointing up simply click it again to make sure the largest files are at the top. Then you can see the sizes. If you don't see a Size column here you could shrink these columns like that to make more room and you could also do View, Show View Options, and you'll have different columns you can choose here. So make sure Size is selected so it appears there.
So now, with this sorted by size, I see the largest files at the top. Now it's not as useful as you would think because I'm looking at the entire Mac. I'm going to see System files, Library files, all sorts of things in here that I may not want to be mixed in with the documents I actually want to find. So it's actually better to look in some specific places. There are going to be four places that you should check.
Use the Go menu and go Home. Home is going to be where you're going to have your Documents and Desktop folder if you're not using iCloud Drive. But even if you are using iCloud Drive you're still going to find things like Movies, Music, Pictures, Downloads, and some other things that would be on your local drive not stored in iCloud Drive. 
So if you do the same search here, I'm going to do Command F, File Size, is greater than 100 MB. This will show me what I've got in my Home folder. Here I get something very useful. I see I do indeed have a lot stored in Final Cut Pro and iMovie. So of course those are video files and it makes sense I'm using a lot of space there. Here's something pretty big and I can tell it's in my Downloads folder. If I look down here at the bottom I can see the path to it. Here's a video file that's taking up some space as well. So that's the first place to look.
The second place to look is if you are using iCloud Drive use Go, iCloud Drive and do the same search here. Command F, File Size, is greater than, 100 MB. This will show me anything that I have there. Now if you don't find anything that's this size you may want to shrink the size a bit. Like 10 MB. I do find several things that are larger than 10 MB. The third location is Go, then Applications. If you do that search here then you'll find any apps that are taking up more than 100 MB. You'll have them sorted so you can see which apps are pretty big. If you see an app here you want to get rid of note that you shouldn't do anything here. What you should do is go to Launchpad and then click and hold an app to get the little x's there and uninstall it that way. If it's an app from a third party developer make sure you use their official uninstall method.
The last place I want you to look is your User Library folder. Now if you use the Go menu you're not going to see it here unless you hold down the Option key and then it appears. Then go into your Library. Do the same search here. It's going to be hard to interpret what's here but sometimes the path can give you a clue. So I click on this file here and I see it's Library Application Support Mobile Sync Backup. Ah! Okay so these are iPad and iPhone backups. I'm going to show you a better way to look at these in a minute. Then you may see some other files. If I shrink to 10 MB, for instance, you may see this. You look at the path library, Applications for Goggle Chrome. Oh, okay. It's actually part of Chrome. So if you see a lot of things there that are part of applications for an app you may want to consider getting rid of that app if you don't use that app.
Now let's look at a better way for typical Mac users to find large files. Go to the Apple Menu and About This Mac. Now go to Storage. Then click on Manage. Here you can get all these categories on the left. It may take a few minutes for these spinners to stop after calculations are done. If you look at Applications you get a really quick good list of the apps that you have and how much size that they are using. You could also select one and then choose to Delete it although I would recommend using the official uninstall method, either Launchpad or for an app like this, an Adobe app, there's a way to uninstall through Adobe. I wouldn't just delete it here.
Now Documents, you would think would show you your Documents folder, but actually it shows you more than that. It shows you everything in your User folder. For instance this is in the Movies folder here. So it is showing you all of your stuff. There is a Delete button there as well. This is a great way if you see, like here's something in Downloads I don't need anymore, to just Delete it. If you want to jump to that folder in the Finder you can use this Show in Finder button here.
Now this method shows you two locations that could be taking up a lot of space in your hard drive that are hard to see otherwise. The first is iOS files. I talked about backups a minute ago. So here I've got three backups. These are really old backups because this is a demo account. But let's say this is an old iPhone and this is my current iPhone. I may not realize that I still have a backup for my old iPhone there. I can actually select that and use this Delete button here to get rid of it. That could save a lot of space. You saw all those files that showed up in your Library folder before. They all may be too small together to show up but the backup itself here may be pretty big. So the only way you're going to find you may be to delete these backups is going in here.
Another place to look is Music Creation. What you're going to get here is a total size for GarageBand and maybe some other apps like if you have Logic installed. A lot of people don't realize how much space all the music samples for these apps take up. So if you just downloaded GarageBand to play around with it but you don't really use and you're desperate to get back hard drive space you may want to consider using this button here to remove the GarageBand Sound Library. Then, of course, you can also go to Launchpad and delete GarageBand completely. That will give you back a lot of space because that's a pretty big app. 
You also see down here Other Users which isn't something you can act on here but it is a good reminder that if you can't find large files it may be that you don't have them in your User Account. That there's another user, whether it's another family member of another User Account you created for some purpose. That may be taking up a lot of space. In that case you would have to login as them or have that person login in their User Account and maybe do some cleaning in there.
So when you find those large files you may not just want to delete them. You may want to keep them around even if you don't need to use them all the time. A technique a lot of Mac users, like myself, use is to Archive them. That's to get an external drive and then copy those files to an external drive, delete the originals on your Mac, and then know that you can always go back to that external drive if you need to get access to those files again. This is especially useful if you create project based work. Like if you create videos or music and you have this project and you finished with it but you don't want to delete it but you're probably not going to be going back to it anytime soon. You can then Archive that project to an external drive so you still having it around but you free up that space on your internal drive to use for other things.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Finding the Largest Files On Your Mac”

John R Carter Sr

5 years ago

And a much easier way is to use DaisyDisk to get a graphical representation of all the files on a drive. The paid for version offers additional features that you probably don't care about.

Nick

hi Gary
this question maybe a little too app-specific but it's related to space management. Do you know what happens to messages in Mail if we move them to the archive folder? I was considering using it to keep emails that I might need to refer to in the future but didn't wanna just put them in mail folders. I wasn't sure if archiving messages would reduce the space these messages (and attachments) use up. Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

Nick: Like all things email, it depends on your email service provider and how you are set up with that server. For me, using Gmail and iCloud I archive everything. But for the most part that means it is on the server, not really taking up much space on my local drive. Is Mail using a lot of space for you? If you are using modern email (iCloud, Gmail or IMAP) then it shouldn’t.

Sandy Paine

I didn't have enough room to download Catalina which I'm waiting until the bugs are worked out. Went to the Apple store. The used the Daisy Disk also and deleted what what using up all the GB. didn't have to buy it.

Kay Fisher

Grandperspective - Greatest space app ever. One of my greatest fears with Catalina was that it would break Grandperspective. But they updated it. Avail in the mac app store for $2 or free from gethub.
Try it - you will like it!

Comments Closed.

Finding the Largest Files On Your Mac

Comments: 5 Responses to “Finding the Largest Files On Your Mac”

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