How to Free Up Space on Mac?

Running out of space affects your overall computing experience. Thus, if you want your Mac to run smoothly, you need to maintain free storage space. There is no definite number for free storage, but generally, experts recommend you should have 10 percent of available storage space free at all times. Or else your Mac will lag or work slowly.

Worst case, if your MAC doesn’t have available storage space, it might not startup. In such cases, you will see the startup disk is full notification. And you cannot overlook such warnings. That is the main reason why you need to know how to free up space on your Mac.

You may also need to clear some storage space on your Mac if you want to install updates for your operating system.

Furthermore, when Apple launched macOS Big Sur in late 2020, many users found that they did not have sufficient storage space to download this new macOS.

Under such circumstances, you must know simple and quick ways to free up space on your Mac, and we are there for you, always. If you want to know how to free up storage space on Mac, below are the best methods, along with other essential details.

How to Free up Storage Space on Mac Quickly?

There are many ways to free up space on your Mac, but the quickest and simplest of those are mentioned below for your perusal. Follow these points to ensure that you don’t run out of storage space again on your Mac:

Look for unused files:

The first thing is to check all the files and apps you don’t need or don’t use. To do it, first, click on the ‘Download folder’ and open the folder in the ‘Home Finder.’ Now highlight all the programs and files that you don’t use or need. Next, right-click on them and move them to Bin/Trash.

Sort the Files via File Size

The next thing is to sort all the unused or unnecessary files via their size. To do it, you need to open the finder in your Mac and look for ‘Home folder’ by pressing ‘Shift-command-H.’ Then, press ‘Command-F,’ and you will see a new Find window.

Then, look for the ‘Kind’ from the drop-down menu and click on the ‘Others’ option. Keep scrolling, and you will see ‘File Size’ and tick the box next to it and press OK. Now you will see another dropdown menu; here, you need to pick the ‘greater than’ option. Keep the file’s size to 100MB or as per your preferences. Now you have all the files larger than 100MB, and you can move these to Trash Bin.

You will see many options while sorting out the files. You can also sort out the files through other modes such as types, extensions, last used date, and more. Besides, you can perform similar searches to delete those files that you have not used or opened in the past year. In this way, you can easily free up significant space on your Mac.

Free up Storage Space on your Mac via Desktop

If you are like me and your Mac looks like a dumping ground. Here is another thing you can do to make it run faster and to free up storage space. Open the Home Finder again and find the Desktop folder option. Next, sort by file’s size and delete all the large-size programs that you don’t need.

Alternatively, you can also sort out the files by locating the Screenshots (mostly, they are PNG files). Select and delete all those files that you don’t use from your Desktop.

Now comes the most important part of the process. After moving all the unused items, files, and screenshots to your Trash bin; Right-click on your Recycle/Trash Bin and select the Empty Trash/Empty Bin option. This will permanently delete those files from your Mac.

This permanent deletion will free up a few GBs for you, and for most users, that will be enough. However, if you want to free up more space, follow these steps to do so:

How to See what’s Taking up Space on Mac

If you don’t have sufficient available space on your Mac or you feel that the device is working slower than normal, we recommend you check out which programs and files are acquiring space on the drive.

After doing so, you can easily determine which files and programs you can delete or don’t need, and you will be able to free up some valuable storage space on your Mac.

In this regard, you can also use the various third-party software, and many apps will show you which programs or files are acquiring a large part of your disk space. Some of our recommended apps for this purpose are mentioned below:

• GrandPerspective
• DaisyDisk
• OmniDiskSweeper
• CleanMyMac
• Parallels Toolbox.

All these apps work flawlessly with Mac systems and can help you in freeing up storage space. Plus, these apps have multiple versions.

Thus, you can utilize free versions if it works for you or opt for their premium versions. However, the premium versions work much better, and the charges are also affordable.

Apart from using these apps, some other things that you can do are mentioned below:

Remove Duplicate Files

Another thing that acquires a large chunk on your disk are duplicate files. Identifying and removing duplicate files is another effective method of freeing up storage space. 

In this regard, the first thing to do is to determine how much of your valuable storage space is being acquired by these annoying duplicate files? Normally, you will see bigger hard drives on the market with great storage capacities, but Apple and Mac PCs don’t follow this rule.

Instead, you will find smaller and faster SSD drives in most Mac systems. The issue with these drives is that they have relatively smaller capacities as compared to the others. Hence you need to follow a high level of file discipline.

Furthermore, there are many reasons why you see these duplicate files on your Mac. For example, when you add your favorite tunes to your iTunes and ‘Copy files’ to your iTunes Media folder, you get the original file, and you will also find an instant file in the music library. You can also check this Best Applications for MacOS.

In this way, your high-quality songs and music files can add GBs of duplicate files to your systems and waste your precious hard drive space. And you will not be aware of them until your system’s performance drops down significantly.

Similarly, if you are using Apple Mail, keep in mind that all attachments are stored in Mail’s download folder. And this is another major source of file duplication in your PC. These were only a few scenarios, and there are many other scenarios that result in duplicate files.

You can also take help from third-party apps in this regard. These apps use different strategies to find duplicates and provide you full control over these files. Here are our recommended apps for you that you can download from Apple Store:

• Tidy Up
• Singlemizer

Delete Extra Languages

Mac operating systems feature a wide range of languages. All these languages are included automatically during the OS installation. To be precise, there are 25 different languages, but most of us need only one or two languages and don’t use all these languages.

To check the languages, go to ‘System Preferences’ and look for the Language & Region; here, you will see all the installed languages, and you can easily set your preferred one.

Furthermore, most applications and software support multiple languages, but we don’t need that many languages. Hence you can comfortably free up additional storage space by deleting those extra languages if you don’t need or use them.

Here is the complete process to remove extra language files that you don’t need or use that often:

• First, you need to go to the Resources folder.
• Then find the folders that end with ‘.lproj.’
• You will see various language files inside this folder. From here, you can delete those language files that you don’t need to free up some storage space on your Mac.

In the End

Now you understand how to trace and remove all the unused and duplicate files on your Mac. All the methods and tricks mentioned above are simple and require several clicks, but you will surely see improvement in Mac’s speed and overall performance after doing so.

Or you can take advantage of the third-party apps we’ve identified to help you free up storage space on your disk and clean the drive easily and quickly.

Also Read: How to Calibrate the Power of Your Mac?

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