- How To Clear Space On Macbook
- How To Clear Space On Mac
- Free Up Disk Space Mac Parallels
- Free Up Disk Space Mac El Capitan
- Free Up Disk Space Macbook Air
Free up some much-needed space on your Mac and delete as many of these old download files as possible, and remember to come back and tidy it up every few months. CleanMyMac can help for sure. But also, consider switching your email client to Unibox, which automatically reduces excessive downloads. The bigger the files you can delete, the more space you can free up—so let's go hunting. Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the menu bar and choose About This Mac. If that overview.
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.
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
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.
How To Clear Space On Macbook
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.
System junk is comprised of:
How To Clear Space On 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.
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. 😉
Contents
- How to free up space on a Mac?
- How to see the used Storage on a Mac?
- How to Fix Mac Startup Disk Full with pCloud Drive?
- Note: If you have very low disk storage you must do the following:
- Example:
If you are a Mac user and you have a smaller HDD Macbook, chances are you have seen this message at least once: “Your startup disk is almost full” or you want to know how to free up space.
In this article, I will explain why this happens and how to never see this warning ever again!
How to free up space on a Mac?
What is a “Mac Startup Disk”?
Your Mac startup disk is a volume or a partition of a drive that contains a usable operating system. You can set your Mac to automatically use a specific startup volume, or you can temporarily override this choice at startup.
What this means is that the startup disk is the “home” of all the files needed for starting your Mac and using it.
Without a startup disk, you will not be able to switch on your computer.
Why is my Mac “Startup Disk Full”?
In short, you have too many files. When this happens, it slows down all processes on your computer – see, in order to complete some tasks, your computer needs space to store temporary files and system files. When this happens and you run low on storage, the operating system needs to decide whether it can delete some files in order to complete the task. Most of the time this is not possible and the computer crashes or becomes very, very slow.
It is recommended that a startup disk should never be at above 85% of its capacity in order to work properly.
How to see the used Storage on a Mac?
If you want to see the exact types of files that are using the storage on your Mac:
Click the Apple in the top-left corner
Click on “Storage”
Currently, I have 73.9 GB used and 425.2 GB Free.
Most of my used storage is from “Other”
What is “Other” in the Mac Storage?
According to Apple, in OS X El Capitan or earlier versions, “Other” files are those that your Mac doesn’t recognize as belonging to any other category. These include files within disk images or archives, data stored by apps such as Contacts or Calendar, and app plug-ins or extensions. When your Mac is running in Safe Mode, all files are categorized as Other.
How to Fix Mac Startup Disk Full with pCloud Drive?
What is pCloud Drive
pCloud Drive is a desktop application that creates a secure virtual drive on your computer, which you can use to easily store, access and work with your files in the cloud.
Free Up Disk Space Mac Parallels
To add files and folders to your pCloud Drive, simply drag and drop* your data into your virtual drive. You can then be sure that they are safely stored in the cloud and synchronized on all of your devices.
*for this to work fast you need to have at least some free storage on your startup disk. If you don’t, keep reading!
pCloud Drive provides a number of additional functionalities, such as integrated file sharing and synchronization through your computer.
Note: If you have very low disk storage you must do the following:
Choose the folder you want to Sync with pCloud:
Click on the pCloud icon and choose Sync to pCloud:
Free Up Disk Space Mac El Capitan
Create a folder on pCloud Drive:
Wait for the Sync to be completed:
This is very Important! After the Sync is finished, you must stop it with the cross icon:
After you stopped the Sync you can delete the files you just synchronized:
You can go to pCloud Drive and see the files you synced and use them as if they are on your computer! (A green icon means everything is synced.)
The app significantly eases your work upon performing file operations in the cloud, because with pCloud Drive you can work with your files using any software on your computer.
What this means is that if I have a vacation video in pCloud Drive I can watch it with no problem with the default video player on my computer. In my case VLC Player.
The best thing is that since the video is in pCloud Drive it is not actually on my computer but it’s in the cloud and does not take ANY of my Startup Disk Space!
Free Up Disk Space Macbook Air
Another awesome thing is that I can watch this video also on my phone with the pCloud mobile apps OR if I’m using a different computer that does not have pCloud Drive, I can watch it via Chrome, Firefox or any other internet browser. I just need to go to my.pcloud.com and sign in. Here is what I see:
Same thing works for:
– Documents – I can open and edit them with any text editor with pCloud Drive or access them from any of the other apps. The same works for worksheets, PDFs, presentations etc.
– Photos – I can open them, see them or edit them with Photoshop or any other image editor.
– Audio files – I can listen to them on my default music player or with pCloud mobile and web apps music player. I can even create playlists within pCloud.
– Every other type of file – As long as I have an app or a program to open the file with, there is no problem for pCloud Drive.
Nice right?!
What this means is that you can move all the files that are using your Mac Startup Disk Storage in pCloud Drive.
That way they WILL NOT use any of the space on your computer and you will still have access to them and use them with the apps installed.
Example:
I have a 512GB SSD Macbook Pro Retina. I also have a pCloud Premium account which is 500GB of storage. This makes my Macbook capable of storing 1TB worth of files.
Sharing with pCloud Drive
You can share any file or folder that you have in pCloud Drive.
You just right-click on the file or folder you want to share and choose if you want to invite someone to the folder or create a so called Download link.
This way you can collaborate with people or share the vacation photos and videos with your friends for example.
pCloud Speed
When you use pCloud Drive, you don’t even understand that your files are not stored locally. That’s because of the super high speed that we offer for uploading and downloading files. We compared our upload and download speed with the ones of Dropbox and here are the results for 1.12GB file:
pCloud Security
To guarantee your files’ safety, pCloud uses TLS/SSL encryption, applied when information is transferred from your device to the pCloud servers.
Your files are stored on at least three server locations in a highly secure data storage area.
Optionally, you can subscribe for pCloud Crypto and have your most important files encrypted and password protected. We provide the so-called client-side encryption, which, unlike server-side encryption, means that no one except you will have the keys for file decryption.
Conclusion
A lot of Mac users have the same frustrating problem. Startup Disk Storage fills up quickly on smaller versions (128GB and 256GB) and if you use it for work, you can fill up a 512GB Mac very fast too. Especially if you are a designer or a video editor for example, and work with large files. And even if you are not creating huge files, with the pace we are creating information is growing very fast:
Just think about this: smartphones and cameras that can shoot RAW files and in 4K, which means you’ll have photos and videos of amazing quality – but they will also take a lot of memory so the more space you have, the better.
pCloud Drive helps you virtually add storage to your Mac (or any PC for that matter). You can move your photos, videos, music, documents any other kinds of files there and use them as if they are on your device with the apps you are used to. Also, you can access them on a smartphone via the pCloud mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile, and in a web browser when you go to the website and sign in.
P.S.
If you never want to run out of storage on your iPhone too, read this.