Maintaining a decent buffer of free space on your Mac is essential to keep everything running smoothly and maintain your sanity. Nobody likes having to frantically find free space for a huge update as their Mac grinds to a halt.
With that in mind, here are six quick and easy things you can do to claw back some free space. Do them now, and repeat them regularly.
6
Clear Out Your Downloads and Desktop Folders
Your Downloads folder is probably full of junk files you don’t need. Application installers, old documents you’ve forgotten about, ZIP archives, and other useless files should all be deleted. Open Finder, navigate to Downloads in the sidebar and take a look inside.
You can find out how much space you stand to gain by right-clicking (Control+clicking) the “Downloads” icon and hitting “Get Info.” Now take a deep breath and nuke the lot. If you’re worried about losing important files, you should take the opportunity to carefully comb through the folder. If you’re after a quick fix, you can use Finder’s List View to arrange files by size and delete the biggest ones first.
Repeat the same process for your Desktop folder, which should also be pinned to your Finder sidebar. If you’re not using the Desktop as a dumping ground, it’s probably just full of screenshots since this is where macOS saves captures by default.
If you’re feeling brave, you can have the Downloads folder automatically empty itself (and the same is true of the Desktop folder). You can even hide the Desktop altogether if you want a clean look, which has the benefit of preventing you from using it to store files.
To break the cycle, stop using either of these folders as long-term storage (especially Downloads). Instead, make a habit of deliberately moving files that you want to keep to a safe location. You can then add these folders to your Finder sidebar as shortcuts for quick access.
5
Delete Your Unused Apps
Installing Mac apps is easy, to the point where you can amass a heap of apps that you never use. While there’s nothing wrong with keeping a few small utilities around just in case, larger applications like games you’ve finished playing or free trials that have expired should be promptly removed.
There are two ways you can go about this. You can browse your Applications folder in Finder, making a note or anything that looks out of place or that you know you’ll no longer need. Alternatively, you can head to System Settings > General > Storage > Applications.
While you’re here, take the opportunity to click the “Last Accessed” tab to list installed apps by the date and time you last accessed them. You’ll be surprised how long some applications can sit there on your Mac’s drive, doing nothing. It’s also important that you take the opportunity to delete them properly.
Dragging an app icon to the trash will delete the app’s core files, but it won’t get rid of everything. There will still be files left on your drive, including caches of useless temporary data in the macOS Library folder. Instead, you should use an app like AppCleaner or PearCleaner to thoroughly delete the app and all associated files.
These utilities list all installed apps and find any associated data scattered across the drive. AppCleaner has a sentry mode that you can enable that runs in the background and stops you from deleting apps the old-fashioned way. PearCleaner can find stranded files left over from apps you may have already partially deleted. Both tools are worth keeping on your Mac, and both are completely free.
4
Quickly Locate Large Files (and Trash Them)
It’s surprisingly easy to lose track of large files like videos or disk images, especially if they’re nested within other folders. Whether you’re working on a video editing project or moving RAW images to your drive for editing, it’s important to remember to clean things up when you’re done. That’s where apps like GrandPerspective and OmniDiskSweeper come in.
These are tools for finding and visualizing disk usage. GrandPerspective offers a map of your drive, which makes it easy to see where your drive space has gone. It’s great if you want to see disk usage mapped out on front of you, and you can select a cluster and then click “Reveal” to open Finder and start sorting.
OmniDiskSweeper is a bit different in that it’s purely designed to find large files. The app uses a column view to help you navigate your drive, highlighting large folders, and listing them in descending order by size. While you could accomplish a similar task with Finder alone, OmniDiskSweeper is a much quicker way of doing this.
Both apps are free (GrandPerspective is $2.99 on the Mac App Store, but you can download it for free from SourceForge instead). Both will ask to scan your Mac and prompt you for permission to access various parts of your drive and libraries. Once the initial scan is complete, both allow you to quickly move around and start cleaning up the files that are hogging your Mac’s disk space.
3
Erase Outdated Device Backups
I haven’t made a local backup of my iPhone for years and if you rely on iCloud for backup purposes there’s a good chance you haven’t either. So imagine my shock when I discovered I had not one but two local device backups on my Mac’s local drive, wasting useful space.
Head to System Settings > General > Storage > iOS Files and click on the “i” information icon to list any backups that may be on your drive. You can then highlight them and use the “Delete” button to get rid of them for good.
Remember: there’s no point in keeping local backups that are years or months out of date. Local backups have their uses (they make it easy to quickly restore an iPhone or iPad if something goes wrong during an iOS or iPadOS upgrade, for example), but if you’re paying for iCloud storage then they’re pretty much always worth deleting before you forget about them and lose out on gigabytes of wasted space.
2
Clean Up Your Messages
If you’re deep into Apple’s ecosystem, you probably use Messages on an iPhone to stay in contact with friends and family. One of the big benefits of Messages is that everything is synced to your Mac. By default, Messages keeps every message and file sent and received. Most of it is stored in iCloud, but these files can make their way to your local drive, too.
Head to System Settings > General > Storage > Messages to see which files are stored locally on your Mac. You can click the “Show in Finder” button to be taken to a random local folder in the macOS Library that contains the file (which demonstrates how fragmented this stuff can get).
Deleting these files won’t affect what is stored in iCloud. Head to System Settings > Your Name > iCloud to see your iCloud Messages storage.
1
Empty the Trash
You’ve probably just deleted a bunch of files by moving them to the Trash, and there’s a good chance you already had files in there before you started. Access the trash using the icon on your Dock and click “Empty” to recover all that space instantly.
If you want to skip the Trash altogether when deleting, highlight the files you want to delete and then use the Option+Command+Delete shortcut. You’ll be asked to confirm that you want to delete the files immediately, click “Delete” and the files will be gone.
Alternatively, you can have the Trash empty itself automatically. Open Finder then, in the menu bar at the top of the screen, click Finder > Settings and access the “Advanced” tab. From here, check the “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days” option. You can now ignore the Trash can altogether, except when you accidentally delete something and need to recover it.
Storage is arguably the most important upgrade you should consider when buying a new Mac, as it’s important that you have enough free space to last the entire lifespan of your computer. Hopefully at least one of these tips has helped you recover some precious Mac disk space.
