How to free up storage space on your Mac Save space by storing your content in iCloud or using built-in tools to find and remove large or unneeded files. Optimized Storage in macOS Sierra and later. can save space by storing your content in iCloud and making it available on demand. Clear out your Downloads folder. The Downloads folder on my Mac is a constant wasteland of files I. Browse the top-ranked list of Macbook Pro Internal Hard Drives below along with associated reviews and opinions. This Western Digital 2TB SATA internal hard drive maintains a space between the recording head and the disk to reduce wear. See all Internal Hard Drives. This WD Black Internal Serial ATA Hard Drive safeguards up to 2TB of.
Optimized Storage in macOS Sierra and later* can save space by storing your content in iCloud and making it available on demand. When storage space is needed, files, photos, movies, email attachments, and other files that you seldom use are stored in iCloud automatically. Each file stays right where you last saved it, and downloads when you open it. Files that you’ve used recently remain on your Mac, along with optimized versions of your photos.
Time to free up some space (and speed up my Mac as a result)! On my MacBook Pro's ( $820 at Back Market ) 256GB hard drive, nearly 100GB was taken up by two iPhone backups and an iPad backup. How to free up space on a packed hard drive. That’s changed now that my MacBook Air uses an SSD drive. I find that I’m running low on storage but don’t have a plan on how to free up.
* If you haven't yet upgraded to macOS Sierra or later, learn about other ways to free up storage space.
Find out how much storage is available on your Mac
Choose Apple menu > About This Mac, then click Storage. Each segment of the bar is an estimate of the storage space used by a category of files. Move your pointer over each segment for more detail.
Click the Manage button to open the Storage Management window, pictured below. This button is available only in macOS Sierra or later.
Manage storage on your Mac
The Storage Management window offers recommendations for optimizing your storage. If some recommendations are already turned on, you will see fewer recommendations.
Store in iCloud
Click the Store in iCloud button, then choose from these options:
Storing files in iCloud uses the storage space in your iCloud storage plan. If you reach or exceed your iCloud storage limit, you can either buy more iCloud storage or make more iCloud storage available. iCloud storage starts at 50GB for $0.99 (USD) a month, and you can purchase additional storage directly from your Apple device. Learn more about prices in your region.
Optimize Storage
Click the Optimize button, then choose from these options.
Optimizing storage for movies, TV shows, and email attachments doesn't require iCloud storage space.
Empty Trash Automatically
Empty Trash Automatically permanently deletes files that have been in the Trash for more than 30 days.
Reduce Clutter
Reduce Clutter helps you to identify large files and files you might no longer need. Click the Review Files button, then choose any of the file categories in the sidebar, such as Applications, Documents, Music Creation, or Trash.
You can delete the files in some categories directly from this window. Other categories show the total storage space used by the files in each app. You can then open the app and decide whether to delete files from within it.
Learn how to redownload apps, music, movies, TV shows, and books.
![]() Where to find the settings for each feature
The button for each recommendation in the Storage Management window affects one or more settings in other apps. You can also control those settings directly within each app.
Empty Trash Automatically: From the Finder, choose Finder > Preferences, then click Advanced. Empty Trash Automatically selects “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days.”
Other ways that macOS helps automatically save space![]()
With macOS Sierra or later, your Mac automatically takes these additional steps to save storage space:
How to free up storage space manually
Even without using the Optimized Storage features of Sierra or later, you can take other steps to make more storage space available:
Learn more
Today, in 2020, MacBooks are more spacious than ever. The new MacBook Air 2020 is confirmed to be shipped 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.
That’s the bad news. Now for the good. There are several simple ways to fix the low disk space problem, including one we’re especially fond of: wiping out junk files with a cleaner app. We recommend CleanMyMac X — it removes system junk and empties multiple trashes to free up disk space on your Mac. You can download it now and get cleaning right away, or take a look at some DIY ways first.
What’s causing low disk space on your Mac?How To Free Up Space On Macbook Pro Hard Drive Hard Drive
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) have commandeered most of the disk’s available 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 look up at freeing up some space.
How to increase disk space on your Mac
There are several options here, so let’s go through a few.
1. Move large, old files off your Mac
Often times 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 CleanMyMac app. It has a dedicated Large & Old File finder. With it you can find some massive documents and sort them by type, last used, and more criteria.
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 archive. to see how it works, it’s a really handy feature if you have a lot of heavy stuff piled up.
2. 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. Just note, however, that simply dragging an app into your Mac’s trash doesn’t eliminate all of its related files.
CleanMyMac’s App Uninstaller, on the other hand, leaves no leftover pieces behind, which means more available space on your Mac. When told to delete an app, CleanMyMac X finds every related document and file, no matter where it has been tucked away, and marks it for deletion.
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.
3. Take out your Trash
Review your Trash bin’s contents one last time before you empty it. Click on your Trash and click the Empty button that is found to the right of the pane.
Tip: Use Command + Option + Delete to delete any folder immediately bypassing Trash.
4. 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 in there, not making a sound. Hiding. ?lick the Downloads stack in the OS X Dock and browse what’s sitting in there, wasting space on your disk. Anything that’s unnecessary can be dragged to the Trash.
5. 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.
How To Free Up Space On Macbook Pro Hard Drive Docking Station
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:
6. 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 on the ?Apple Menu > About This Mac > Storage
Choose “Manage…” By far, the most-space demanding of your files will be Documents.
Using the quick tabs above you will decide what is there you can toss away.
Make sure to also check Recommendations (on top of the list). There are a couple more space-saving options there. 7. Delete your Desktop screenshots
Mac’s Desktop is where you keep screenshots by default. macOS Mojave and its successor, macOS Catalina have a tool called “Stacks” that organizes your Desktop into clearly labeled folders. One of such folders will be Screenshots which you can later remove in one sweep.
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.
How To Free Up Space On Macbook Pro Hard Drive Backup
System junk is comprised of:
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 Space On Macbook Pro Hard Drive
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 get CleanMyMac X for free and wave goodbye to space-hogging files. Don’t worry. You won’t miss them. Hopefully, you liked our tips on how to clear disk space on Mac — drop by for more Mac housekeeping tips?
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