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 [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so if your hard drive is full and you want to quickly clear off 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 a 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 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 and this is going to show you a list of everything you've got downloaded you can 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 downloader on the left it's going to show you all of the podcasts you currently have downloaded and you can click here on these 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 could see all of your podcasts here you could sort by size and then you can put the largest on top and then you can 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 re-download the podcast just like you can re-download tv shows and movies that you've purchased later on you don't have to store them on your mac so the third place to look is books and in books there's no downloaded section here but if you go to library all you'll notice some of the books have the cloud icon there meaning that you don't currently have them downloaded and others do not and you can click and then remove like that but the storage manager also has 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 in some other places garageband has to store a lot of audio data on your drive now if you rarely ever use garageband or maybe you just use it once to play around with it and right now it's not important you need to clear off some space you could do so by getting rid of a lot of garageband data so go to the computer level in the finder and then go in your hard drive down to library and in there now there are a few places here where you could find garageband content first let's look at 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's 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 and 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 can go back to the storage manager like before and then you can select music creation and you can see there's 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 besides 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 its 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 and 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 can look for xcode caches project archives and project build data and indexes you can delete any of these you can also shift click to select multiple ones and delete and then even if you're done with those go into your user folder into library using the option go menu there and then go to developer and then xcode then look for user data here and ib support and 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 to the xcode level look for derived data and you can get rid of stuff left over from some of your projects there that'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 and you'll see some profiles run times 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 now using icloud to backup those devices but maybe sometime in the past you back 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 the backups for 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 we would update our iphones and ipads through our macs or maybe you still do it that way and 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 and of course you can delete those your iphone and ipad are probably way past those updates and you can 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 folder 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 and 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're 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 a while ago or an old version of an app that you're no longer using and 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's got quite a bit of stuff right here as well then most of the rest of the stuff down here this is just too small to even 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 in to system and then into library and then you're going to look in two places one is speech get information on speech see how big it is so it's one gig 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 then see what seems to be speech you can see here voice services so that's a voice as well mac and talk voice assets so that's something as well so you can see about three gigs there so four gigs 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 then to spoken content and you're going to see system voice here now select that and go to customize and 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 will 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 and the siri voices are the largest one 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 that are some default ones they're really small anyway those older voices and then you can 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'll just make things slower and it could eat up your bandwidth if it has to re-download 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 and 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 could 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 that's attachments and 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 you can select it and then sort through it just like you could the podcast 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 and 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'll be named i can select that and do command i and it'll 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 that you can do one is that you could 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 maybe three dollars a month or something like that but what will happen is it will offload 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 have optimized mac storage turned on for that space savings to happen and 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 nice feeling to know that your photos aren't just on your mac and maybe your backup drive that's sitting next to it that they're somewhere else in case there's a disaster that takes out those two things but do note you don't see that savings right away it will take time for everything to upload and for some of the older less viewed photos to be offloaded so they're 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 could do file export export unmodified original for this many videos and you can then 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 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 thing 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 dot photos library and then use name contains that then have it search this mac and i'll come up with any old photos libraries that maybe you can get rid of you can select it hopefully you remember why it's there and what's in it based on its location also search for dot iphoto and it will find any old iphoto libraries from before the transition from iphoto to photos matter of fact a lot of people when they transition they left their old iphoto library around for a while just to make sure everything was okay and maybe you forgot about it and now that you know everything's 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 and you can get to it in the dock by just clicking on it and 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 can 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 a while empty your trash finder go to finder empty trash and get rid of everything and if this is becoming a problem for you having your trash full of files forgetting to empty them you could go into the storage manager if you look under recommendations you'll see empty trash automatically and you can turn that on with a button here and any file that's all during 30 days will be deleted now of course some of the biggest files on your drive are probably in your applications folder if 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 and now you can see which applications take up the most space and sometimes there are things you don't need anymore like maybe a game that you finished and 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're 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 applications folder to the trash but for some apps it's more complex like there's an uninstaller app 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 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 and it will show you the contents of all those folders so now you've got a list of basically all of your old email 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 and 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 do a search for file size and select it there and then do file sizes greater than and something like 100 megs and then change the search area from documents or wherever you started into this mac and we'll find all of the biggest files that you've got on your drive and if there's something that 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 to put it in the trash but a lot of times the big things aren't individual files but maybe 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 or 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 and 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 gigabytes 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 it's 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 the 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 can 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 a while now once it's connected let it do its backup leave it alone for a while perhaps overnight and it should have everything backed up and the local snapshots are gone and you have more available space for some reason you really can't do that you need to clean up space you can go into system preferences then go to time machine and then see where it says backup automatically turn that off if you turn it off it's going to delete 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 an hour later to turn it back on or turn it back on when you next connect your time machine drive and 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 [Music] if you like this video click the thumbs up button below to let me know i publish new tutorials each weekday hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out you

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Keywords: free up space on mac, free up storage on mac, mac hard drive full, free up space mac, other space full mac, how to free up space on a mac, startup disk full, how to free up space on mac, mac free up space, free up space on mac hard drive, free up space on mac for monterey

Id: 0-xtOFy8XfU

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2021