By following these tips and tricks you can free up a lot of space on your Mac’s hard drive.
If your Mac is running out of space on its hard drive there is only one thing you can do: free up storage. We often store many things on our Mac that we no longer need and that is why we are going to show you how Locate large, useless files so you can free up disk storage on your Mac. It’s pretty simple.
When A Mac has little storage space and its operation can slow downso this is something highly recommended when you have little space left.
How to know how much space is left on your Mac
This is something essential. Before starting to free up space on our Mac’s hard drive, we must know how much space we have used and how much is free. Fortunately, Apple and macOS make it very easy for us thanks to a special section dedicated to storage. This is how you can get to it:
- On your Mac, go to System Settings from its icon or by tapping the above.
- Now tap on General and then enter Storage.
- A bar will be displayed with the total size of the disk and the space we are using.
From this section you can free up a lot of space on your Mac
How to free up space on your Mac
Now that we know how much space our Mac has occupied on its hard drive, let’s move on to the tips to reduce footprint. Chances are, most of it is due to applications, although System Data can also take up a lot of space on your Mac’s drive.
Optimizing storage
This is a function that we also have available to free up space on the iPhone and that makes it Your Mac can optimize storage using iCloud to automatically achieve more storage space when needed.
When you enter System Settings > General > Storage, your Mac will advise you to optimize storage and save files to iCloud. If you have extra space in Apple’s cloud, this is highly recommended to free up space on your Mac.
Emptying the Mac Trash
Emptying the trash is essential to free up space, you can do it by doing right click on it and then tap Empty Trash. But if you are one of those who tend to forget, I recommend automating this process.
again from System Settings > General > Storage* you can activate an option that will make it delete files sent to trash after 30 days. In this way, we will gain a lot of space with files that we have deleted.
It is advisable to activate this function to forget about emptying the trash
Deleting large files
It is possible that we have very large files saved in a folder on the Mac and we do not know them, we could search for them from the Finder but Apple has a better option. We came in System settings > General > Storage and tap on the “i” next to Documents. The first section is Large Files and the files that occupy the most will appear there and you can delete them directly.
Deleting apps that you don’t use
Deleting apps from the Mac is much easier than on other systems since we do not have to “uninstall” them. You can drag the icon directly to the trash, although I recommend that you System Settings > General > Storage and tap the “i” next to Applications.
You will see a list with all the apps installed on the Mac in order from most to least space. Simply Select the one you want to delete and click Delete. It is the best method to delete apps from a Mac.
There may be many iPhone backups and files saved on Mac
Deleting iOS downloads and backups
If you manage your iPhone from the master, it is likely that several update and backup files which can take up several GB of storage. Going into System Settings > General > Storage on your Mac and by tapping on the “i” that appears next to iOS Files We can see how much they occupy and delete them quickly.
Move your Photos library to an external drive
If you have a lot of photos in the Photos app on your Mac, it is likely that the photo library takes up several GB of data. If this is your case, perhaps it is It is advisable to move the photo library to an external hard drive. We have very good options for hard drives that we can buy for a Mac.
It is true that it has its drawbacks, to access our photos we will have to connect the external drive, but it can save us a huge amount of space. My photo library occupies 90 GB and I have it on an external drive to free up the Mac drive. Doing so is very simple:
- Connect a hard drive to the Mac, I recommend that this hard drive has a format that works on macOS and Windows.
- Close the Photos app.
- Search for your photo library in the Finder, by default it is saved in the Pictures folder in your Home folder.
- Drag the photo library to the external storage drive.
- Double-click the Story Photos library in its new location to open it.
- Within Photos, click Settings > General in the menu bar and then Use as system photo library.
Delete emails
If you use the Mail app on your Mac to manage your email, a lot of data may have accumulated over a long period of time. Enter the Mail app, choose Mailbox > Delete Mail spam in the Mail menu bar. Also select Mailbox > Delete Deleted Items to gain extra space.
Empty the Downloads folder
We can accumulate a lot of data in the Mac Downloads folder that we downloaded at the time and no longer use. It is worth reviewing at least once a month whether we want to continue keeping the downloaded files. Simply go into the Downloads folder and delete the filesI recommend doing this in the Finder for greater convenience.
Using space management apps
There are multitudes of applications that allow you to free up space on your Mac in an effective way automatically analyzing our entire disk in search of files that we can eliminate. This was very interesting before Apple improved file management from its settings, although it is still an option to consider.
One of the most famous apps is Clean My Mac, although there are many other interesting options. The good thing about this type of apps is that operate semi-autonomouslyinforming you when it is interesting to delete files and which ones are optimal.
Following all of these tips and tricks you will surely be able to free up several GB of space on your Mac’s hard drive. With most current Macs you cannot increase capacity once purchased, so this is essential.
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