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’s only one thing you can do: free up some storage space. We often store a lot of things on our Mac that we no longer need and that’s why we’re going to show you how Locate large and unnecessary files to free up storage space on your Mac. It’s quite simple.
When A Mac has little storage space and may run slowlyso it is something highly recommended when you have little space left.
- How to know how much space is left on your Mac
- How to Free Up Space on Your Mac
How to know how much space is left on your Mac
This is something essential. Before you start freeing up space on our Mac’s hard drive, you need to know how much space we used and how much is free. Fortunately, Apple and macOS make our task much easier thanks to a special section dedicated to storage. Here’s how to access it:
- On your Mac, go to System Settings from its icon or by pressing above.
- Now tap on General and then enter Storage.
- A bar will be displayed with the total disk size 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 takes up on its hard drive, let’s move on to tips for reducing the footprint. Chances are, a lot of this is due to applications, although system data can also take up a lot of space on your Mac’s drive.
Optimize storage
It is a function that we also have to free up space on the iPhone and that makes it Your Mac can optimize storage using iCloud to automatically get 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.
Empty Mac Trash
Emptying the trash is essential to free up space, you can do this by doing right-click on it then press Empty Trash. But if you are one of those who tend to forget, I recommend automating this process.
once again System Settings > General > Storage* you can enable an option that will do this delete files sent to trash after 30 days. This way we will save a lot of space with the files that we have deleted.
It is advisable to activate this function to forget to empty the trash
Deleting large files
It is possible that we have very large files saved in a folder on Mac and we do not know them, we could search them from Finder but Apple has a better option. We entered System Settings > General > Storage and tap 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.
Delete apps you don’t use
Deleting applications on Mac is much simpler than on other systems since we do not need to “uninstall” them. You can drag the icon directly to the Trash, although I recommend System Settings > General > Storage and tap the “i” next to Applications.
You will see a list with all applications installed on Mac in order from greatest to least space. Simply Select the one you want to delete and click Delete. This is the best method to remove 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 save files which can take up several GB of storage. Go to System Settings > General > Storage on your Mac and by tapping the “i” that appears next to iOS files We can see how much they take up and quickly delete them.
Move your photo library to an external drive
If you have a lot of photos in the Photos app on your Mac, chances are the Photo Library is taking up several GB of data. If this is your case, this may be the case. It is recommended to move the photo library to an external hard drive. We have some great hard drive options that we can purchase for a Mac.
It’s true that this has its drawbacks, to access our photos we will have to connect the external drive, but this can save us a lot of space. My photo library takes up 90 GB and I have it on an external drive to free up the Mac drive. It 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.
- Find your photo library in 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.
- In Photos, click Settings > General in the menu bar, then click 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 additional space.
Empty the Downloads folder
We can accumulate a lot of data in the Mac Downloads folder that we downloaded back then and no longer use. It is worth checking at least once a month if we want to continue to keep the downloaded files. Simply go to the Downloads folder and delete the filesI recommend doing this in Finder for convenience.
Use space management apps
There is a multitude of apps that help you free up space on your Mac efficiently automatically scanning our entire disk for files that we can eliminate. This was very interesting before Apple improved file management from its settings, although it remains an option to consider.
One of the most well-known apps is Clean My Mac, although there are many other great options. The advantage of this type of applications is that operate semi-autonomouslyinforming you when it is worth deleting files and which ones are optimal.
After all this 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 can’t increase the capacity once purchased, so this is essential.
You can follow iPadized on Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter (X) or check out our Telegram channel to stay up to date with the latest tech news.
Table of Contents
