Inventory Your Disk Space

Figuring out what you have on your hard drive that takes up a lot of space is simple if you know how to view the contents of your drive. You can use the List view and View Options to easily see which major folders use a lot of space, and then continue to dig down to see what inside those folders is using the space.

Comments: 17 Responses to “Inventory Your Disk Space”

    Jasper Robinson
    8 years ago

    Another tip I find useful for space saving and tidying up is using 'fdupes' in Terminal, which hunts down duplicate files. You can get fdupes to eliminate dupes immediately (if you're feeling brave!), or confirm deletion/keep, file-by-file. It's probably worth generating some test files to get a feel for how it runs before launching on the real task.

    Douglas Swanson
    8 years ago

    Gary, I waited a long time to see the sizes of all the files but it never showed. Is there something else that I may not have clicked?.. re-clicked 'calculate sizes' still nothing.
    I am on a Macbook air OS 10.12.2

    Thanx

    Douglas

    8 years ago

    Douglas: What is a "long time." If you have a lot of files and have never done this before or recently it could take a while, especially at the top level. Let that window sit for a while (30 minutes? 2 hours?) while you do other work. The System and Library have a ton of files in them.

    Jean-Claude
    8 years ago

    Hi Gary,

    Wouldn't it be faster to use the "All My Files" command on the side bar and then sort by size? That's what I usually do.

    8 years ago

    Jean-Claude: That only shows your documents and will leave out a lot of things like iMovie libraries, iTunes content, Library files, etc. It is also hard to see context. For instance, you may have an old folder from an old work project that has 1,000 files in it and takes up 2GB of space, but no one file is that much.

    Jean-Claude
    8 years ago

    I didn't know that. Thanks for clearing that up!

    Jean-Claude

    Carol Peterson
    8 years ago

    Is there a way to do this on the iPhone 7+?

    8 years ago

    Carol: There is no universal file system on iOS like there is on a Mac. Each app has its own storage area. You can see which apps are using the most space, though. See my recent video on this: http://macmost.com/check-storage-on-your-iphone-or-ipad.html

    John Vertolli
    8 years ago

    Gary, using this, I see that my Photos Library uses 196G and my iPhotos Library uses 148G which i have not used since I converted since April 2015. Can I delete this iPhotos Library now?

    8 years ago

    John: Yes, if you converted to Photos and haven't touched your iPhoto library since, you can delete it. I periodically archive my photo library and I took this moment as a good time to do so -- so I have my "final" iPhoto library archived and then deleted it from my Mac.

    BV
    8 years ago

    i'm on 10.12.2 and do not see the same list/options when i go into show view options. please advise.

    8 years ago

    BV: Are you looking at a Finder window in List view -- you will see different options in Icon or Column view.

    BV
    8 years ago

    no, doing exactly what you say in your video.....

    8 years ago

    BV: Use imgur.com or a similar service and upload a full screenshot of what you are seeing and I'll take a look.

    BV
    8 years ago

    so this is what i see when i click on view: http://imgur.com/a/HdA7j
    thanks!

    8 years ago

    BV: I can see in that screen shot that you are looking in Column View, not List View. Switch to List View and you'll see the options you want. See the group of four buttons in the toolbar? (Icon, List, Column, an d Cover Flow). You have Column selected. Click on the second one, List View. Or use View, As List in the menubar if you prefer.

    BV
    8 years ago

    got it. thx!

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