However, there is one problem that is free up mac hard drive space quite common, and it is noticeable among people who already have some experience with MacBook’s. Hard drives do not offer the most amount of space, and those who would like to keep more files on a Mac struggle. When using your Mac, maintaining a small amount of free drive space is required to keep your system running optimally. While nothing stops you from adding files to your drive until it can hold no. Store all files from these two locations in iCloud Drive. When storage space is needed, only the files you recently opened are kept on your Mac, so that you can easily work offline. Files stored only in iCloud show a download icon, which you can double-click to download the original file. Learn more about this feature.
Today in 2021, MacBooks are more spacious than ever. The new MacBook Air comes with a 256-GB hard drive. But no amount of storage seems to be enough as the ever-inflating digital media is taking over our hard drives. Cloud servers are only a partial answer to that. They aren’t getting cheaper and consume insane amounts of the world’s electricity. So if you want to take a load off your drive and help the planet, you should teach yourself a couple of storage-keeping tricks. Let’s go.
What’s causing low disk space on your Mac?
Before you begin to free up disk space, let’s identify what’s taking it up. From the Apple Menu in the upper left-hand corner of your screen, select About This Mac and then click the Storage tab in the window that opens. You’ll get a handy, color-coded graph that looks like this:
In the above example, you can see that apps, audio files, and “other” (for details on what this “other” category consists of, look here) are taking the most significant amount of space.
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It’s nice to see what’s stored on your Mac, and even nicer to be able to browse the folders that contain the files themselves. Now that you’ve identified what’s on your drive let’s free up some space.
How to increase disk space on your Mac
There are several options here, so let’s go through a few.
1. Remove large and old files
Mac Free Up Hard Drive Space
Often the files that end up taking the most space are tucked away in “cold storage” on your computer. These are big movies, photos, or the like that you rarely look at but can’t part with, either. In this case, archiving the files and moving them to an external drive is a good way to free up storage space on your Mac.
Locating huge neglected files can be a pain, but it gets super easy with the CleanMyMac X app. It has a dedicated Large & Old File finder. It will help you find massive files and sort them by size to define the largest ones quickly.
You can download the free version of CleanMyMac X here.
As the name suggests, it finds files that occupy a lot of space on your disk but haven’t been opened for a long time. You can quickly review these files right in the app and decide which ones you want to remove. It’s a really handy feature if you have a lot of heavy stuff piled up.
2. Empty Trash
Review your Trash bin’s contents one last time before you empty it. Press Command and right-click the Trash folder on your Trash icon. Then, click Empty Trash to remove everything.
Use Command-Option-Delete to delete any folder immediately, bypassing Trash.
3. Clean up the Downloads folder
Files love to hide in your Mac’s Downloads folder. Old disk images, random photos, unused extensions, ZIP files… they’re all in there, not making a sound. Hiding. ? Go to Finder and browse what’s sitting in your Downloads, wasting space on your disk. Anything unnecessary can be dragged to the Trash.
4. Delete duplicate folders and files
How many times do we copy or download things twice? Like many users, I would prefer to have a backup twin of my important files. But that often ends up in my files being quadrupled…or what do they call a 4th or 5th copy of the same folder?
To effectively remove duplicate files and make space on Mac, you can use Gemini 2. This is how this app looks.
You can download this little duplicate finder here.
Gemini 2 analyzes potential duplicates by many criteria, not just the name of the file. It searches for:
- Duplicate folders
- Duplicate movies
- Similar images
5. Learn to use Optimized Storage
Optimized Storage is the built-in feature of the macOS. It’s a sorting algorithm that shows different categories of files on your Mac for review and removal.
- Click the Apple Menu > About This Mac > Storage.
- Choose “Manage…”
By far, the most-space demanding of your files will be Applications.
Using the quick tabs above, you will decide what is there you can toss away. Make sure also to check Recommendations (on top of the list). There are a couple more space-saving options there.
6. Uninstall unused applications
If you’re like me, you often try an app “...just to see what it does”. While that’s fun, it frequently results in a slew of forgotten apps. It’s a good practice to set a reminder to review your Applications folder and clean out the ones you no longer use. However, note that simply dragging an app into your Mac’s trash doesn’t eliminate all of its related files.
CleanMyMac X's Uninstaller feature, on the other hand, leaves no leftover pieces behind, which means more available space on your Mac. CleanMyMac X finds every app-related document and file, no matter where it has been tucked away and deletes it from your Mac.
And speaking of setting up a reminder, CleanMyMac’s scheduler will handle that task for you, too. Just tell it how often you’d like to be prompted to give your Mac a good cleaning and leave the rest to the app.
7. Delete your Desktop screenshots
Mac’s Desktop is where you keep screenshots by default. With a feature called “Stacks,” you can organize your Desktop into clearly labeled folders. One of such folders will be Screenshots, which you can later remove in one sweep.
- Go to your desktop.
- Right-click somewhere in the middle of your Desktop.
- Select “Use Stacks”
Now you should see the Screenshots folder with all your screengrabs neatly stuffed inside. Drag this folder to the Trash and empty it.
8. Get rid of system junk
It’s not just your files that are hogging disk space — it’s also useless system files like logs, cache, unused binaries, old iOS backups and installers, and what not. Fortunately, CleanMyMac can find and eliminate them all to make low disk space a thing of the past, at last.
Clear Hard Drive Space Mac
System junk is comprised of:
Free Hard Drive Space Mac
- User cache files
- Application cache
- Broken downloads
- Unused .DMG installers
As you can see, the 'User cache' category alone can recover about 3 GB of space. So the best way to free up space on Mac is to start with this type of files.
Free Up Hard Drive Space Mac
With just a few clicks, you’ll discover what’s where and what’s ripe for deletion. The best way to free up hard drive space is to run CleanMyMac X and wave goodbye to space-hogging files. Don’t worry. You won’t miss them. Hopefully, you managed to clear a lot of disk space — drop by for more Mac housekeeping tips. 😉
Mac Os X Clear Hard Drive Space
From MacFixItCheck Free Space On Mac
Free Disk Space On Mac
For some users, an issue is more prevalent under Mac OS X 10.3.8 where available space on the startup volume rapidly declines autonomously.
In many cases, this issue is caused by problematic hardware device drivers or other software components that rapidly record error messages to system logs, causing them to swell and occupy previously free space.
MacAlly's iShock driver is notorious for this behavior under Mac OS X 10.3.8 and is a prime case example for this issue.
The iShockXDriver application has an apparent incompatibility with Mac OS X 10.3.8 that causes repeated error entries to the system.log file, causing the file to swell to sometimes enormous sizes (several gigabytes). MacAlly has since released an updated driver -- version 1.0.4 -- that resolves this issue.
Other devices can cause the disappearing drive space problem as well, however, and once they have generated the abnormally large log files, there are a few methods for deleting them and re-claiming lost space.
The easiest method is to use the Console application located in the Applications/Utilities folder on a normal Mac OS X installation. Once you have launched this application, click the 'Logs' button in the top navigation bar, and select the offending (swollen) log file. Press the 'Clear' button to delete its contents.
What if you're not sure which log file is swelling? Mac OS X log files are stored in the /var/log directory on a normal installation. This directory is invisible, however, so you will need to use Mac OS X's 'Go to Folder' command (located in the 'Go' menu in the Finder) in order to access it.
Once you're in this directory, look for any abnormally large files with the naming scheme 'System.log.(a number).gz,' i.e. 'System.log.1.gz' and move them to the trash.
An alternative method is simply to use the Finder's 'Find' command (located in the Finder's 'File' menu) to search for any files over a given size -- usually 100 MB or so. It is important that you add a criterion (by clicking the '+' button next to an existing criterion) to search for both visible and invisible files -- doing so will ensure the appropriate log files are found. Drag these files to the trash (you'll be asked to enter your administrator password) and delete them.
Some shareware utilities -- including Cocktail -- can also clear various log files.
After or before attempting any of the above procedures, try disconnecting any USB or FireWire devices and check for persistence of the log swelling.
Some typical reader reports (of which we've received several dozen) concerning the disappearing hard drive issue under Mac OS X 10.3.8, implicating specific devices and offering a few other data points:
Bruce writes: 'Same problem here. My PowerBook 1.25 GHz started the week with 30 GB free on the drive and over the course of the week, dropped to 4 GB free. I moved 10 GB of stuff to another disk, which got me to 14GB of space, but the other 16G is still absent. I ran MacJanitor, but that didn't change anything. After restarting the computer, I suddenly had 22 GB free. Somehow the restart gained me 8 GB of space, but the other 8 GB is still missing. I've repeated this process twice over the past two weeks with the same result. A restart will result in several GB of disk space being freed up, and the longer the computer goes without a restart, the more is lost.'
Michael Cappelletti writes 'I too am having hard drive space problems after the latest system update. I have discovered that the console.log files are the problem on all accounts.'
How To Free Hard Drive Space
Mac Os X Free Hard Drive Space
Jun 19, 2018 Your Mac’s hard drive probably has temporary files you don’t need. These files often take up disk space for no good reason. Mac OS X tries to automatically remove temporary files, but a dedicated application will likely find more files to clean up. Sep 03, 2010 The disk utility in OS X cannot repair the directory structure on a startup disk (verify it, not fix it), so you will need to run it from the install disk. Take your install disk that came with your Mac, put it in and restart. Do NOT reinstall it, but rather go to the Utility. Nov 01, 2016 Thanks to expensive SSDs, the base storage capacity for a new Mac is now a paltry 128 GB. With this in mind, macOS Sierra includes a new feature set aimed at optimizing hard drive space. To optimize storage space, the OS analyzes the content of a user’s hard drive and sorts files into two camps: “purgeable” and everything else. Mar 15, 2018 When you connect a Mac-formatted drive to Windows, you’ll be informed that “you need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it.” Don’t click the “Format disk” button or Windows will erase the contents of the drive–click “Cancel”! Hp laserjet 1022nw driver mac os x. Both Windows and Mac OS X have full read-write support for exFAT drives without any.