10/18/23
9:00 am

What To Do When Your Mac’s Drive Is Full

If your internal drive is almost full then it is time to clear out some applications and files. Here's how to do that in 7 steps without the help of any third-party apps.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Is your Mac's internal storage full? Let me show you how to clear some space in seven steps.
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So if you saw a message saying that your internal storage almost full or you happen to notice it getting pretty full here's how to clear out some space. The first step is to go in the Apple Menu to System Settings. Now I'm going to show you what this looks like in macOS Sonoma and macOS Ventura. Older versions do it a little differently. We're going to go here to General and then we're going to go to Storage. Now, you want to ignore what you see at first. It's going to take some time to populate everything. Notice how we had all those spinning wheels there. This up here isn't complete yet. It is still figuring out how to categorize items. You want to make sure all of these things have stopped spinning and give it some time for this to complete. Right now you see it says system data takes up a lot of space. But if I wait a little bit you'll see that it recategorizes things over time and most of that system data is now categorized as other users. Which makes sense since I have multiple user accounts on this Mac and one of them, my main account, is actually using up a ton of space.
But the thing to keep in mind with this graph up here is it's categorizing things. These aren't locations. So when you find the section that says Documents, that is not your documents folder. That literally means things that are documents. It is a category. Not all of your document files are going to be in your Documents Folder. But we're not really going to use this to try to clear off space. Instead we're going to look below. 
The first section I want you to look in might be the biggest. It's Applications. Click on the little info button here to the right and it is going to give you a list of the applications you have installed. It may take a minute or two to calculate all the sizes but then you can sort by size by clicking on this column here and make sure that the largest is at the top. You can then see which application you have installed that take up a lot of space and decide whether or not you want to uninstall some. You can usually select one and use the Delete button here. Sometimes you get an uninstaller button which will use the developers official uninstaller. Other times, if it is a third party app that you didn't install through the Mac App Store, you may want to look up the official way to uninstall it from that app support site. Keep in mind it's easy a lot of times to reinstall apps, especially from the Mac App Store. But also from other developer websites. So if there is an app you rarely use deleting it doesn't mean you don't own it anymore. You can usually redownload it pretty easily if you really need the app later on. 
Next, you're going to look through the rest of this list. First concentrate on things that have the names of applications. Like Mail, Messages, Music. Sometimes when you click on the Info button you'll get a list of things that you can remove. For instance in the Messages App you can select an item that takes up a lot of space. You can sort this by size and you can delete it right here without going to the Messages App. But for other apps you're just going to get a number. You'll have to go to the app itself to change what you've got stored in the app. You won't find a lot of apps here because they don't actually store data in some sort of application library. Like Pages, for instance, all the documents would be document files. Not things stored internally in Pages. But other apps, like Podcasts, have special libraries. If I look here I can see which episodes I've got that are taking up the most space and delete them right here. I may also want to open up the app and change my settings so it doesn't automatically download episodes or store a lot of old ones. Each app works a little differently. So you want to go through the list here and look at anything that matches the name of an app.  Like TV, Podcasts, Photos, and so on. 
Next you're going to want to look for the item called Documents. If you look at the info for that you get four different ways to look at your documents. If you look just a large files you'll see which files are the biggest. Now this is going to look throughout your User Home Folder and throughout iCloud Drive. So it is a nice way to have a combo view of all of your stuff. If you find something here you can delete it. But what I recommend doing is using Show In Finder. Then it will take you to the folder that has that which will give you some context for what this is. It may also show you files around it that you've grouped together. Then you can make a decision of whether to delete it and have it gone forever or maybe get an external drive and move that item to the external drive, deleting it from your internal drive to free up space. In addition to large files you can also go to the File Browser here which will show you a view of all of your folders where documents can be stored. So you're going to see things like movies, which is in your User Folder, but also documents which in this case is in iCloud Drive. Notice you get sizes here. So you can really dig down and figure out what is taking up space. I see how much space my Documents Folder is taking up and I can see all of the folders in there and how much space each of those is taking up. So I can ignore things that don't really use up much space and pay attention to things that have a lot of items in it taking up a lot of space. Again you're going to want to select a file or a folder and Show In Finder and go there and decide whether to delete, archive, or just keep those items because you need them. 
You can also look in things in your Downloads Folder and you're probably going to make sure this is empty. If something is in here move it to a nice folder inside of your documents folder. Organize things appropriately. Treat your Downloads Folder as a temporary storage place for something that you've just downloaded and you haven't yet figured out where it is going to live. Then unsupported app will just show you any app you have installed that won't work on your Mac. 
Next, you're going to look at everything else. So everything that is not an application and it is not this Documents Folder or Applications Folder. For instance here I've got Developer. I'm going to get info on that. It's going to show me some things that are taking up space that I use as part of  Xcode. You probably won't see this here unless you use Xcode as well. You may see other items here and you can decide what to do with them. Music Creation is an interesting one because a lot of things are actually used by both GarageBand and Apple Logic. So they group them together here. I can remove the GarageBand Sound Library with this button. If GarageBand is something I installed and played around with but I don't really use it anymore I may want to do that. 
Now that leaves items down here at the bottom. The System is a system that needs to be there, of course. Other Users shows you other user accounts so you're going to want to switch to other accounts and do this all over again to find out what those accounts may have that is taking up space. But at the bottom you're going to see the mysterious System Data which a lot of people ask about. They don't understand why it is taking up so much space. This is actually fairly normal amount of space for System Data to use. But some people may find that it is taking up even more than this. To dig into System Data you can't actually do anything right here in System Settings. You're going to have to use the Finder. 
So in the Finder create a new Finder window and what we want to look for are Library Folders. There are actually two. One is the System Library Folder shared by all user accounts. One is Library Folder for this one account. With the System Library Folder choose Go and then Computer and then go into your drive and look for Library right there. Then go into it. Make sure you're using List View because List View is the best way to do this. You can see Size here to the right and Sort so the largest is at the top. If you just see dashes here for size choose View and then Show View Options and make sure Calculate All Sizes is turned On. Then look at what you've got here. Look into each folder and just figure it out from the context. For instance, here is a folder that is obviously used by my online backup. Here's a folder that contains all my fonts. Makes sense what these are. Applications Support, if you expand that and look at the sizes I can see that Logic takes up a lot of space and if I use Logic or GarageBand in this case then that makes sense. Here's one from Adobe and I can look in here and see all of the different things that Adobe is storing in the Library Folder. It's okay not to find anything to get rid of at the System level in your System Library Folder. But if you do find like apps that you no longer use at all and you maybe uninstalled it, then maybe you want to delete that here. Otherwise there is usually not much to be done in this Library Folder. 
To go to your other Library Folder choose Go and hold the Option Key down inside the Library. This will actually go to your User Folder, Library Folder. In here if you sort by size, just make sure Calculate All Sizes is turned On, then you can figure out what is taking up the most space. In this case Caches uses the most space. Caches are fine. They actually speed up your Mac. It is counterproductive to actually delete your caches because as soon as you go back to that app it is going to take time to regenerate the cache and it's just going to take up the same amount of space. The only useful thing here is that is if there's an app that you say have uninstalled and still taking up space here, the cache is left behind and you can delete the cache since you no longer use that app.
If you look under Containers you're going to find folders that have application names. Sometimes you have to really kind of look and exam the name here to figure out what it is. But in the most part these store items that you need to use those applications. If there is an application that you uninstalled but it left behind a folder here you can get rid of it. The same thing for Group Containers as well though sometimes it is hard to figure out what these are from. Here, for instance, this one is from Podcasts so I wouldn't actually want to do anything with this folder directly but instead go into the Podcast App and delete some of the downloaded podcasts and change my settings. 
One of them I find here that is usually pretty big is Mobile Documents. This is your iCloud Drive folder.  When you go into here it actually takes you right to iCloud Drive. So it is no big mystery as to what this is. You don't want to actually do anything with this. You would have dealt with anything in iCloud Drive back when we were looking at Documents in System Settings. 
Now you just want to repeat this with other user accounts that you have on your Mac to clear out space. That's it! Keep in mind that the results of this maybe that you still don't have enough space in your internal storage to keep everything around. In that case you're simply going to have to make hard decisions about archiving files to an external drive that you don't think you'll need. Then maybe for your next Mac remember to get a larger internal drive. As you can see here I didn't use any third party tools at all. A lot of people jump right to using some sort of third party tool and you don't need that. You can do everything you need to maintain your drive using System Settings and the Finder. So I hope you found this useful. I have another video you should checkout that shows you some locations that may have some files that you don't need. So check that one out as well. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 24 Responses to “What To Do When Your Mac’s Drive Is Full”

Sheldon

6 months ago

Thanks bunches

Justine

6 months ago

Does it make sense that system data should still be calculating hours after clicking on storage? Should I be taking the computer offline?

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Justine: Probably not. Maybe with a very old Mac with a HDD? Not sure what you mean by your second sentence. Maybe do a restart and then try to see your storage again.

6 months ago

Gary, thank you for all the excellent information. I recently retired and now can archive all my email messages. I have more than 20 years of email to archive. Most are in specific files according to a project or specific colleague. How do I archive all the messages?

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Ed: Hard to suggest something because there are many things you can do. Why archive them at all? Just leave them as you have them now. Or, you can use Mail's Export Mailbox feature. But it really depends on your email service, which you don't mention. Many services have a way to download archives and such.

Pam Trump

6 months ago

I have a secondary drive. I’m think of moving all of my photos off my Mac air to this drive. Is there any easy way to do that in order to free up space?

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Pam: Do you mean a MacBook Air? You could do that, but then you'll lose access to all your photos unless you have that drive attached. So your MacBook may not be as portable as it once was. Instead, maybe consider using iCloud Photos instead with the "Optimize" feature.

Justine

6 months ago

Hi Gary. Just watched again and thanks as always for your clear explanation of things. I wanted to let you know that I have a 2020 MBAir and last night upgraded to Sonoma 14.0. The Systems data was spinning for a while even with the upgrade so I again restarted and this time it finalized its tallying. I followed everything else you recommended. Thanks!!

nick

6 months ago

Gary, Storage shows that Podcast is taking up 14 Gb storage. I deleted all the podcasts listed and the Storage setting still shows Podcast taking up 14 Gb. Do I need to restart to refresh the storage settings? Thx

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

nick: Do what did you do, exactly? Like did you choose View, Remove All Downloads? There's nothing to do after that. Perhaps it just hasn't updated the amount yet.

nick

6 months ago

Went to System Settings > General > Storage and clicked the "i" in Podcasts. It listed a whole bunch of old ones. I selected them all and deleted them. Next time I restart I will check again to see if it changed, but so far it still shows the same storage amount.

Kathy

6 months ago

Hi Gary, Using Sonoma, with iCloud Drive on. Is it expected to not see the documents folder in System Settings: About: Storage? I have optimized mac storage toggled off as I have lots of room on my Mac drive. Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Kathy: System Settings, About, Storage shows you CATEGORIES, not locations. The Documents folder is a location.

Kathy

6 months ago

Hi Gary, sorry, I am confused. Should the 'category' for documents still be viewable there, my document category is not. Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Kathy: Perhaps you don't have enough for it to make up a "slice?"

TN Args

6 months ago

Excellent information thank you. I thought a little more space could have been made to discuss how to use a fast external SSD on a fast port to act like an expansion of the internal SSD (not just like an offsite storage-only drive). Or maybe this is on one of your other videos?

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

TN: You can't really use an external drive as a true "expansion" of the internal one. iCloud Drive, for one, won't expand over onto it, neither will swap memory. And it will never be as fast as your internal one. Most external SSD drives aren't nearly as fast as the ones Apple puts inside. But you can certainly store items on an external drive if you like.

Kathy

6 months ago

Hi Gary, Re: my storage category area not showing a 'document' category. I found an apple article that says (in part) "The Documents category contains files in your home folder that aren’t included in other categories, such as Pages documents and PDFs." Could it be that by using iCloud Drive & having 'Desktop & Documents Folders' toggled on, that could explain my not seeing 'documents' in the storage categories? I appreciate your help Gary. Thanks. Kathy

Kathy

6 months ago

Hi Gary, sorry I should have also mentioned I have 'optimize' toggled off so that all my stuff is also local on my Mac since I have enough space. K

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Kathy: No, it will still show up if you have enough to show. Don't worry about this though. It doesn't matter. It is just handy, but you don't need to do anything with this information.

Mit

6 months ago

Seems this is not applicable to Catalina. I watched the video then skimmed it a few times but don't find the aforementioned advice regarding older systems. Thank you for all of your helpful videos. Best Regards.

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Mit: Perhaps watch an older video if you are still on Catalina. Maybe this will help? https://macmost.com/how-to-figure-out-what-is-taking-up-space-on-your-mac.html

Ken Cameron

6 months ago

Is there an external hard drive for MacBook Pro that you would recommend? HDD is fine with me, but with so many choices, I'd like a professional opinion.

Thanks...keep up the excellent work. Best and most informative site on all things Apple!

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Ken: Depends on what you want. I don't review hardware so I only can recommend (or not) the drives I have used in the past. Are you looking for an external SSD or HDD? For archiving older files?

What To Do When Your Mac’s Drive Is Full

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