Live: Ways to Free Up Space On Your Mac

Hi everyone this is Gary with MacMost.com and on this live episode I'm going to take a look at clearing out storage on your Mac.

So this is a common problem.

You run out of storage space.

You fill up your Mac's hard drive, your internal hard drive and now you want to figure out what's taking up so much space and do some cleaning.

Get rid of things that you don't need.

some things off your drive that you maybe do want to keep but don't really need to have on your Mac.

So I'm going to show you a whole bunch of different techniques.

A lot of people think, oh, I should just go right to some sort of third party app that helps me clean things up.

But you don't really need that.

You've got tools available as part of the operating system that you could use.

So let's take a look at those.

The tool that you're going to use, the main thing you're going to use is going to be in System Settings, go into there, and then you're going to look under General, at Storage.

And this is kind of a hidden app that you've got on your Mac.

You go into this, this section of System Settings, it's like an app onto itself, and it has a whole bunch of things here that you could use.

One of the least useful things is what everybody always gravitates to, this bar here at the top.

It does tell you how much free space you've got and then how much space is being used.

But it doesn't really give you too much useful information about how you can clean things up.

For instance, it takes a while for it to populate and then it still will update after some time and, you know, people look at this and say oh my system data is huge and stop right there not realizing that it's not finished actually updating.

One of the reasons it looks like my system data is huge is that, well, it hasn't yet calculated that a lot of that is for another user account.

Another user account has regular files, not system data, but the storage meter up here isn't correctly calculating those yet.

It usually will after some time but I've also seen it take a long time or not do that.

but I can guarantee you that about a terabyte, if not more, of this system data is actually my main user account regular files that are there, not actually system data.

So this gives you some sort of general idea.

You can see now it's updated and it actually shows you other users in shared and you can see one and a quarter terabytes.

It wasn't system data, right? So this is useful for getting a general idea but it's not really the tool you should use to clear things off.

That's where people make a lot of mistakes.

But below that, that's a lot of useful stuff.

The first area is Recommendations.

Recommendations, it's going to be different for you than it is for me.

It's only given me one recommendation here but you may see two or three or a bunch of them.

You want to In this case the one I'm getting is I can set it to automatically remove movies and TV shows that I've already watched.

If I click Optimize here I can just turn this feature on.

The idea is that in the TV app I downloaded, like I ran into a movie, I downloaded a couple episodes of a TV show or whatever and I've left them on there from, you know, maybe my last airplane trip or something and this will clear those off.

You can also do that manually but that's a good recommendation here.

We're going to get other recommendations here and you should think about each one of those and go through them first.

Then after that you've got this list here.

It took a little while to populate.

Did you notice that? At the beginning there was a lot of spinning little circles and they calculated how much space each of these things were taking.

Now you've got this list and it's showing you things that are taking up a lot of space.

You're in kind of an alphabetical order, Applications, Books, Developer.

You get the idea.

You can see how much space these things use.

The real tool is the little i buttons here.

Clicking on these gives you access to different tools for these different sections and they let you kind of clear things off.

You can go through these pretty quickly.

For instance, let's start with the first one here, Applications.

So I have 100 gigs of applications.

I need to click the I button there for that to be useful for me to have actions that I could take.

You can see here it's going to list my applications.

It's kind of like a little finder view but it's separate, right? Name kind last accessed, which could be useful information, right, if you want to figure out if you used an app recently.

And then size.

And then I could sort by size and it should be by default sorted with the largest at the top.

Now I can go through and actually clear some things off.

I notice a few things right away for instance but it's going to be different for you.

One is the top one is Adobe Premiere.

So I have to think, Adobe Premiere, do I use Adobe Premiere? No I don't.

Why is it there? Because last weekend I decided to look at it, to play around with it.

So with Adobe Creative Cloud I get it as part of my subscription, I hit the Download button a little later on, I opened it up, I played around a bit, and I forgot about it.

Maybe I don't need it anymore.

I could actually select it here and hit the delete button.

I happen to know that Adobe Creative Cloud has its own uninstall function in the Creative Cloud app.

So I'm going to go into that and do that instead.

Well, let's look at some other apps.

I've got two Final Cut Pros.

This is the new version.

This is the older version.

This is the standalone version.

This is the Apple Creator Studio version.

Do I need both? Maybe there's a reason I want both.

Or maybe it's like, oh, this is a good time if I want to save 6.63 gigs to select this one.

I need Delete.

So you can see here not only is this listing applications and telling me what's taking up the most space, but I get a nice uninstaller here with this Delete button.

Adobe Media Coder, same thing with Adobe.

There's Xcode.

Do I code? Do I use Xcode? Yes, I'm going to leave that.

Here's another version of Adobe Premiere.

I've got two versions.

I want to look into Adobe Creative Cloud and figure that out.

iMovie takes up a lot of space.

I use it.

That's fine.

Do I play it? Am I playing it on a regular basis? If not maybe I can delete it.

One of the things to realize is that when you get an app, especially if it's from the App Store, you can redownload it as you want.

The purchase is tied to your Apple account.

So if there's an app here that I got from the App Store and I want to say clear off some space for now because I don't think I'll need that app anytime soon.

I'm not deleting the app as in like now I have to pay for it again.

I'm just deleting it and I could reinstall it later.

I can look through a lot of these.

Here's an app I don't use much anymore, that kind of thing.

Here's this old version of Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer.

Do I really want those around? I can delete those.

I can use the official uninstaller since they were downloaded.

I think these were actually downloaded from the App Store.

You can go through here.

Now, you're going to have some apps that are huge that are not going to appear in this list because for the most part these show you apps that are the single like file kind of apps.

Some apps have like a small file and then a ton of library or like extra content.

I'll talk about that particularly having to do with Steam a little bit later.

So you can go through all of this and clear out the apps you want.

Maybe everything is nice and tight already on your machine and you is one thing you can do.

Now we're back to this screen here.

Let's continue down the list.

There's going to be a lot of things for like books and podcasts and all of that where you can click the i button here and it shows you the content that you've got.

It's going to sort it by size.

In this case I just have a small book there, no big deal.

But maybe I've got a massive book and it's got lots of images and stuff.

I can actually delete from here as well as going to the Books app and deleting it.

Again, if it's something I've purchased in Apple Books I can read download it again.

Let's go to Developer and here it's going to tell me stuff.

I've got Xcode, I've got a bunch of other stuff in here.

I probably, if I was on my main account it would show me I've got a bunch of simulators and I might want to get rid of those.

If you're using Xcode you probably understand what all this stuff is that you particularly have and you can make some decisions about what to get rid of.

I'm going to skip over Documents for now because that's a special one.

I'm going to go to things like, let's say Messages.

Messages, if I go here, it's going to give me a list of attachments.

So instead of having to go through all my conversations to find why Messages might be taking up a ton of space and finding that one conversation I had six months ago where somebody sent me like five large videos I can go into this.

It's sorted by size.

I can find, oh, I got a big PDF, oh, I got a big video or whatever, and I can delete it from Messages.

You also can click Show in Finder, and I think, let's see, I don't think you can drag out of here, but if I do Show in Finder, for instance, it actually opens it up on another screen here, but you can see it took me deep into my library folder, but it took me to that file.

So I can now take this file, move it somewhere else, and that way clear it out of messages but still save it.

So good way to clear that out.

Some of you are gonna find messages as small like this.

Some of you are gonna find it's huge and you need to go through it.

For music, if I was using Apple Music on this account here, it would show me all my downloaded songs and stuff and I could select those and delete those.

So a quick way to clear out music and also do it in the Music app.

You've got the same thing with podcasts here showing me the podcasts I have downloaded in their size.

If you video podcasts they may be taking a lot of space and you can actually use this tool to delete them.

So you can see how this is like a whole application here in System Settings General Storage for taking care of what you've got there.

You've got Trash.

It's telling you what you've got in Trash and it's showing you what's in here.

You can delete things from Trash.

Of course you should also just empty your trash and there are other ways to handle trash.

One thing is in Finder here.

If you go to Finder, Settings, go to Advanced, turn on Remove Items from the Trash after 30 days.

That basically makes your trash into like a 30 day holding place and then they're automatically gone which will save you the problem of like your trash accumulating over years and taking up a lot of space.

So a lot of this stuff.

TV and you can see if you have any TV shows and stuff downloaded you can get rid of those.

So let's return here to this big section called Documents that I skipped over before.

Let's go into that.

There's actually several different sections.

So the first section here is called Large Files.

It finds your largest files.

This is sorted by size.

You get to see the kind.

You get to see the last access date.

You can go through and you can actually delete files directly from here.

You can show in Finder in case you want to do something like move them to an external drive.

I'll talk about that at the end.

You can really find out what big files do you have lying around that could be taking up space that you forgot about or don't need anymore.

Another section is Downloads.

So this is going to look in your Downloads folder and it's going to allow you to see those by size.

Also groups by like older, three months, recent, that kind of thing.

Your Downloads folder is another place that collects files.

So you want to think about, you know, I try to practice this idea of my Downloads folder should be empty.

If I download something I get it in the Downloads folder, I'm either viewing it and then I'm done.

I delete it.

Or I'm moving it to my Documents folder, into a subfolder there, wherever it's supposed to go to save it.

I don't leave things in the Downloads folder.

But if you do now you have a chance to look at what's there and of course you can just go to your Downloads folder.

underneath me here in the Dock and I can go to Downloads and deal with things that are in there.

There's a section for unsupported apps, old apps you may have flying around that you can select and delete that don't work on the current operating system.

Then, just as you thought like, oh this whole tool here isn't deep enough, you've got this file browser which is a whole other level to this tool.

You go into this and it's going to show you all the folders in your Home folder plus desktop and documents even if those folders are in iCloud Drive.

It's going to show you all of them there and show you the total for those folders.

So you get a good idea of what you have that's taking up space.

In this case my Movies folder is pretty big.

I can select it there and it's going to show me the folders and files in there and I can continue to dig down to see what's taking up space.

With any single thing I've got I can select it and select Move to Trash.

I could look here, the next biggest thing is a folder that's in my, I know this is in my home folder called Local Stuff.

It's something I created.

It's in my home folder.

What's taking space in there? What's in my Documents folder? Happens to be in iCloud Drive but I can see what's taking up space.

You can see it getting pretty small which is like a big thing here that I want to talk about is that, you know, the saying don't sweat the small stuff really means that when it comes to clearing out space on your drive.

I know a lot of people are like, I've got all these tiny little files that are here that are taking up like 5K and I don't know what they're for.

Or these other files that are 3 megs or something like that.

If you need to clear off space, concentrate on the big stuff.

Don't worry about the small stuff because they're like specks of dust on your hard drive.

You're not going to make much progress.

If you're just trying to organize your files, then concentrate on all files, big and small, but for clearing space just concentrate on the big stuff.

Okay, so you have this whole file browser here which makes it almost like not needed to actually browse your own files.

But if you do want to browse your own files you can do that.

So you can just literally just look at your files.

You don't need a special app to do this.

Just go going into the Finder and let's go here, let's start off in my Home folder.

So my Home folder is local only, it's not part of iCloud Drive and I can see what I've got here.

And I can see for instance, there's my Downloads folder.

What's in the Downloads folder? I can see what's in the Movies folder.

Now right away I may want to figure out like what should I concentrate on here? Notice all these folders under Size here.

If you don't see Size when you're, I'm in List View, you see I've selected here, if you don't see Size, Control click up here and make sure you turn on Size.

But you're not going to see size for folders usually.

This is an important tip.

This is a technique we're going to use throughout the rest of this presentation here.

You want to go to View and you want to Show View Options or Command J and then look for Calculate All Sizes.

Turn that on.

Now you have the size here and you can sort by it and it works.

It may take a little while to generate the size for each one.

So wait tall until the little two dashes go away.

But once they do you can see here sorting, movies is big, I can open this up and I can see what else is big inside that and deal with it.

I can see, okay, local stuff.

What's big in here.

This allows you to kind of really get to the point and then not bother with things like, oh my music folder.

What's going on there.

Well that's pretty small.

Pictures, it's pretty small too.

It takes up less than a gig, right? So you don't have to worry about that stuff.

It's these two that you have to deal with.

So do that.

Do that for your Home folder.

That's your local files.

Then go to iCloud Drive here.

Do it for iCloud Drive.

So on iCloud Drive I've got size here and I already had calculate all sizes turned on there.

Now And I can see what's taking up a lot of space.

I don't really have much taking up space here but Documents is the biggest folder.

I can open that up.

Inside that example is the biggest folder and so on inside iCloud Drive.

iCloud Drive, if you've got the Optimize feature turned on in System Settings and then go to iCloud Drive and you can see I've got Optimize Mac Storage then it's going to offload a lot of the things you're not using recently and it won't take up as much space.

If you've got that turned off then everything in iCloud Drive is also cached locally on your Mac so it's just like local storage.

Every time you get rid of a file you are saving that space.

But with it turned on you may or may not be saving space by getting rid of stuff.

But you would be saving space on iCloud Drive so that's a whole other topic.

So you may want to deal with it like that.

But that's how you can explore your own files and check things.

But I do want to point out a couple other things here.

One is if we go to the Home folder, so I'm gonna go Home, this is all this stuff.

There's a folder that's missing here.

And this is probably the last most important thing here.

There's a folder missing because it's hidden.

And folders called your library folder.

Now there are various ways to make it visible here.

But you don't have to make it visible at all.

You can go to it.

In the Go menu, there's Library here.

Where is it? It's still hidden but you hold down the Option key and it appears.

This will take you into your Library folder.

Notice I'm in my Home folder in Library.

So without having to make it visible I've been able to get into it.

And I want to do Command J here and make sure Calculate All Sizes is turned on.

I want to sort by size and I want to see what I've got going on in my library folder.

And this is where you might want to get rid of some stuff.

You're probably going to find at the top the same folders I do, maybe not the same order, but caches, application support, containers, they're almost certainly going to be near the top, group containers possibly as well.

Now, application support, if you open this up, you're going to find the names of applications.

For instance, here's an application that transcribes audio.

It's taking up a lot of space.

I know why because it's using a big library of data to do the transcription.

So the fact that it's taking up this much space is exactly what I expect.

I don't want to do anything here.

I don't want to change anything.

As a matter of fact I don't want to change anything for anything here except I want to notice something like when there's an app I don't have.

I know what this app is.

I used it like years ago to do a call with somebody and I uninstalled the app because I've never needed it since then.

I've kept this folder around, for examples, like this.

I know I don't use this app.

I can now get rid of it out of application support.

That's what you're looking for here.

Apps you know that you've gotten rid of that you don't have anymore.

You've only uninstalled the app but you didn't uninstall what was an application Support.

That's either because you didn't use the official Uninstaller from that app or the app itself.

Its Uninstall process wasn't complete.

You know, it could be a lot of different reasons why it's still there but that's why it's still there.

You may not have anything in here that you don't need but it's worth going through and looking at.

Here's another app I don't use anymore.

I could save a bunch of space by getting rid of this.

Just deleting that folder there.

Almost certainly when you delete a folder for an app from here the app won't work anymore.

You're going to have to reinstall it.

So you want to be careful.

Same thing in Containers.

You can look in here and see the names of apps.

If there's an app that you definitely know you've uninstalled you can get rid of that.

And Group Containers is another spot where you can look for things that you can identify are from an app.

And maybe these folders aren't big enough for you to worry about.

Again, don't sweat the small stuff.

So what about this one up here though, right? This is what everybody's kind of wants to go to right away.

Ah, caches, I can clear stuff off.

And look, it's taking up a ton of space.

Caches, yeah, do take up a ton of space and you can save space by clearing them off.

But most cases, you probably shouldn't.

So let me Let me explain a little bit about what caches are and what if you don't know how caches work.

A cache is when an app stores some stuff to speed up the apps running.

For instance, a browser cache, if you go to a website, the website's got a logo, it's got a background, it's got a bunch of different elements.

And when you go to the webpage for the first time, it has to download all of that.

So it takes a few seconds maybe for the page to load, maybe longer if your internet connection is slower.

Even if it's fast, it's still using a lot of bandwidth to do it.

So it caches all of that.

Then the next time you visit the page, the content may change.

Maybe it's a new site.

So the headlines and summaries change.

But the logo, the background, other elements are the same.

It's got cached versions of those.

It doesn't need to download those again.

As you visit different sites, it's caching all that stuff.

So the next time you go to the site it loads faster and doesn't load things unnecessarily.

Caches work automatically so if you don't go back to a site again for a long time those elements are removed from the cache.

It's only going to have things for sites you visit regularly or have visited recently.

So it's a really good system and it works for non-browser apps too.

For instance, a video editing app you may use may make cached versions of the video files that display quickly on the screen so you could scrub back and forth and edit the video.

It's not using the actual real files which may take longer to load and may make the whole interface laggy.

It's basically caching some quick versions of stuff.

So as you use the app, you can quickly edit video.

You quit the app, you go back to editing the next day, it's got a cache of all the stuff there and it's good.

It should also maintain its own stuff, right? Get rid of all things and all that.

So caches are good, which is why when you delete caches from here it's not necessarily a good idea because, number one, you're slowing yourself down.

The next time you're using the app it has to recache things.

Web pages will load slower and use more bandwidth.

at any apps, image at any apps, things like that will take longer to start up and load images and stuff like that.

So you're slowing yourself down, number one.

Number two, as you use it again, you're just rebuilding that cache.

If a browser cache is using space, then going back and browsing again is just going to grow the space.

This is where a lot of the third party apps that say they clear off storage are misleading you.

basically saying, "Hey, I cleared off three gigs of browser cache and aren't I great? Aren't you glad you paid for me? Aren't you glad you have me installed?" But then by the end of the day, the three gigs of browser cache are back.

So it didn't really say anything.

Maybe it slowed you down in the process even.

So deleting caches isn't necessarily a good thing.

However, there are still reasons to go in here to delete things.

same reasons I gave before, if you notice there's an app in here you don't use.

So, like maybe you tried Firefox app for a while, but you don't really use it, you can delete the Firefox cache.

Other apps you may see here, you may think, oh yeah, there's that app, I recognize the name of that app, I don't use it anymore, I will get rid of it.

Again, don't sweat the small stuff as the files get small.

Like, you know, just in the low megabytes and K and all that.

Don't worry about them.

But big stuff.

So this is my video editing app.

This is taking up a lot of cache.

That's fine.

I use it every day.

But let's say I didn't.

Let's say I did a project three months ago with this.

I could delete this.

The difference between the cache folder and application support containers and all is that by deleting stuff out of these, you could damage the app.

In other words make sure you're not using the app.

Make sure you've actually uninstalled it and then you can get rid of its support folders in here.

But in the Caches folder in general you can delete stuff out of the cache and you'll be fine.

So if you say, well I do use Firefox once in a blue moon it's taking up a lot of space.

Maybe a lot more than this.

Maybe it's 5 GB of cache.

You can delete this cache.

Firefox will not break.

It will be fine it will just restart the cache the next time that folder will appear again after you run Firefox and it will start growing again.

But caches aren't harmful to get rid of but they are kind of a waste of time to get rid of caches from apps you use all the time.

So yeah, that's the Library folder.

This is where you're going to get a lot of savings that you didn't know you were frustrated about.

Like oh, there's a lot of space being used And I don't know why a lot of the I don't know why's are going to come out of here.

So you've got that.

So let's see.

Let me I've got a bunch of other topics I want to cover, but before I do that, I do want to talk about how MacMost is supported.

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So let's get back to some other ideas of places you can save space.

If I go back to my home folder here and into pictures, pictures is probably where you have your photos library.

and your Photos Library may take up a lot of space if you've got a lot of photos.

And that may be fine because you've got a lot of photos.

They're photos.

They're valuable.

They're what you want.

They're like one of the main things you use your Mac for maybe.

And they're taking up a lot of space and that's normal.

So you can look here, see how much space is taking up, and probably that's all good.

But you may want to, if it's too big, consider some things.

One thing that I find useful is I try not to put videos in my Photos Library.

Now, if you want to put them in, that's fine.

But what I find is I'm more of an amateur photographer, not an amateur videographer.

I do take videos here and there.

They're mostly throwaway videos on trips and stuff.

They're fine.

But it's the photos I care about.

So, after a while, after I get back from a trip and all that, I will take my videos and in this sample library here, I've only got this one, I will take these videos and I will export them, export the unmodified original, put it, it's just a regular file in a folder somewhere outside of my Photos library and maybe to an external drive.

Or I will get rid of it if it's just something I really don't need.

Then I will keep my Photos library as Photos.

videos take up a ton of space, much more than an individual photo.

So a lot of times people that think, well, I didn't really think I took many photos but my Photos Library is a huge, you know, it's like 100 gigs.

The culprit is you've got a lot of 4K videos in there.

Consider offloading some of those 4K videos, putting them on an external drive and not having them as part of your Photos Library.

Maybe that's a useful technique for you.

Maybe you're like, nah, I like my videos in there.

That's fine.

Let's talk about what I just said about archiving.

So what do you do when you've got files that you see? Like you're looking in here and let's look in Movies and maybe you see you've got an old iMovie project library here.

Maybe you've got a by name here you've got like Projects and you know the Project Alpha and maybe this folder here is like five gigs.

That's a project.

It's an old project.

You're done with that.

What do you do when it's like this is taking up space on my drive.

I want to get rid of it but I don't want to delete it.

Well you archive it.

So the idea is get an external drive.

For most archiving purposes it's meant to be fast.

You can get a cheap spinning drive.

Those are cheaper and bigger so you can archive more stuff.

But you can also just get an SSD.

And I've got one here called Archive and you can see this is what I use it for.

I've got some folders here.

It's my general personal archives.

Personal media.

Remember I said the thing about videos.

This is where I store my videos.

I actually save them out of files and I name the files things.

Like, you know, the year and the place I was at and what the video is.

And I have like a couple hundred video files neatly organized.

All the MacMost projects that I work on, like the old stuff, videos I did last year, whatever, I take all those files, they don't stay on my internal drive.

I'm probably never going to use those again.

They go into this folder here.

So I've put things on an external drive to get them off of an internal drive.

They don't take up any more space and I don't need to access them on a regular basis.

Even if you're using a MacBook this could be something that just remains in your desk, in your desk drawer or on your desk for when you're home.

You don't need to bring them with you.

That's the key here.

If you don't want to delete it get rid of it forever.

Start an archive drive.

You can have multiple archive drives if you've got tons of stuff or big projects you work on.

That's the key strategy that I think a lot of people are missing.

If you've been using your Mac for years and you've never done this everyone kind of gets to the point where there's a bunch of stuff they want to archive and clear off space locally.

It's a key strategy here.

Let's see.

Another thing to point out is Steam.

So let's talk about that.

This is a big thing that happens with a lot of people if you game.

game you probably use Steam.

You have Steam installed, then you install apps inside of Steam.

If you don't game you probably don't know what I'm talking about.

Steam apps not only are big apps because they're, you know, the games but they download a ton of content outside of the app.

Easy.

50 gigs of content for a big, you know, standard game and it's easy to overlook that.

The files themselves are small so they might not show up as big files.

They don't show up as apps because they're not apps, they're content inside.

So you want to go inside of Steam.

I've got Steam installed here, but since this is my demo account, I'm not even logged into something.

But my main account, if I went to the Steam app, you know how it looks.

You have your library, it shows you what a game to have installed.

It's going to show you how much space each one uses.

And if you're not playing a game anymore, if you're finished with it or you're taking a break from it, uninstall it.

You can install it later.

As a matter of fact, uninstalling it to install it later doesn't really waste much time because games get regular updates most of the time.

So it's the kind of thing it's like, oh, I'm playing, you know, Baldur's Gate, I was playing Baldur's Gate 3 and I think I want to revisit it.

Well, guess what? Next time you revisit it, there's going to be major updates to the files.

So uninstalling it now is, you know, and then reinstalling it later reinstalling it's going to get you the latest stuff anyway, you would have had to update anyway.

So that's my my thing about Steam.

Think about that if you are a gamer.

Another thing is, and this is getting rarer and rarer, so I'm just glad to be going to look at this.

I'm just going to point to this webpage, 108809 Apple Support Document.

Just search for this.

This will tell you about backups.

If you backup your iPhone to your Mac rather than to iCloud you may have some very large files there.

Even if you used to and it was years ago you may have a leftover file or two.

This will tell you where to look for them and maybe you don't have anything there or maybe you discover you've got a seven gig file that's been sitting on your drive for the last five years.

So something else to think about there.

So yeah, so I've covered a lot.

One last thing is when you delete a file keep in mind that there are steps to deleting.

Basically you delete something, you're dragging it to the trash, you are, or if you just say file, delete, you know, command delete, it's moved to trash.

You've got to empty the trash.

So if you have it sent to 30 days, it'll be 30 days later, but you can always, you know, I'll open up the trash here, it's underneath me, but here's the trash folder.

All the stuff is in the trash.

There's the empty button.

You also have it under find your empty trash.

You need that step.

But even then you may notice you don't get the space back right away.

One of the culprits for this is basically when you do a Time Machine backup if you're regularly backing up, you know, you've got it hooked up and it's doing it every hour, you probably won't experience this.

But if you like disconnect your Time Machine drive and plug it in like every other Sunday or something like that to manually backup you may run into this.

machine is going to want to back things up even if the drive is not attached.

So it's going to save place markers.

It's going to say, oh, the drive is not attached, but no problem.

Here's what I need to back up and I'll wait for the drive to be attached and I'm all ready to go.

So if you delete a file and you empty the trash, it'll be like, okay, great, I've emptied the trash, but I have a little list here of things I'm supposed to back up and I didn't back up that file yet.

So I'm going to keep that file around even though you don't see it.

Next time you back up I'll back it up and I will remember to completely get rid of it at that point.

So what a lot of people experience is you know you throw away like a bunch of massive files.

You empty the trash, no savings or some savings.

Then you do your time machine backup and then sometime later, 15 minutes an hour the next day all that space comes back to you because it recognizes that oh I don't need this file anymore.

You deleted it, you emptied the trash and now you backed it up.

It was supposed to be backed up but it wasn't because the drive wasn't attached and now it is then you get that space back.

So if you run into issues like empty trash not working like you think you should make sure you've connected your time machine back up and trigger it, run it.

So there's that.

Just like the last thing, that's not all that you can do.

There's a lot, but I think I've given you a ton of different techniques that you can use to clear off space from your Mac.

Let me just briefly look through the questions here and see if I can pick any out, too many to answer right now, but you can leave comments to this video.

It remains here after I'm done with the live stream and I will look, I'll see those comments and I'll answer them.

I'm also going to post this video with improved audio at MacMost.com and add free as well there so check it out there.

Somebody asked, "Can you move large apps to an external drive?" Usually yes.

Usually you can drag and drop an app to an external drive.

You don't want to do that with apps installed from the Mac App Store because it will get confused.

But a lot of times when you install an app from an installer, when you download it from a website, it gives you a choice.

There's also a setting in the App Store that you should know about.

So I'll go to the App Store.

I'm going to go to App Store, not about App Store, but App Store Settings.

And there is a setting, download and install large apps to a separate disk.

So you can turn that on and then the App Store kind of takes care of that for you.

Good thing to know.

Duplicates.

Somebody asked about duplicates.

Yeah, so going through duplicates is tough.

The Photos app has a duplicate finder.

Again, this kind of falls under the don't sweat the small stuff.

This is great for organizing and cleaning up, but if you're trying to clear off space, probably shouldn't be doing this now.

Save it for the organizing time.

But them.

So if they're in two albums, the photo remains in both albums and all that.

So use this function in photos for finding photo duplicates.

Finding file duplicates, it's a little harder, and hopefully you don't have that issue.

But if you're cleaning up stuff, you should be able to, as you're cleaning and organizing your file, something you should do every once in a while, you should be able to like recognize if it seems you've got an issue with duplicates and always to remember to get to the heart of the issue like why do I have duplicates? What was I doing that created these duplicates? Let me change my practices so I don't do that again.

Also when you're looking at large files like in system settings, storage, and you're looking at large files, I mean if the duplicate files are not big enough to be in that list, then again, small stuff.

Don't worry about it now.

But if they are there, then you can kind of investigate and say where are these? Why do I have two of them? And that kind of thing.

then depending on the situation.

So somebody talks about, you know, I talked about system data, don't, you know, system data is giving you categories, broad categories of stuff.

Don't use that for cleaning up your drive.

It's like this, like if you're going to do a house cleaning, you know, you want to clean up your home, you probably do something like today I'm going to clean out this closet.

Today I'm going to clean up the living room, rid of stuff out of like the coffee table and the drawers and all that.

You think of places.

You don't think of things.

You don't say, I'm going to do all the red things I'm going to clean up out of my house.

All the food related items I'm going to clean up out of my house.

All the clothing.

You don't do it by category.

You do it by location.

So while the categories are useful in system settings under storage, just kind of set that aside and do your cleaning based on location, documents, videos, your podcast app, all that stuff instead of worrying about what system data says.

If you take care of all that, especially if you look in the library folder like I showed you, then system data will take up less space as a result of that.

in the comments.

But for now, I think I've given a lot of tips and techniques here for cleaning up your Mac.

I've done videos on this before, but I've covered this as well.

So I hope everybody found this useful or at least interesting.

Thanks for watching.