- #HOW TO FREE UP SPACE ON MAC HARD DRIVE HOW TO#
- #HOW TO FREE UP SPACE ON MAC HARD DRIVE SOFTWARE#
- #HOW TO FREE UP SPACE ON MAC HARD DRIVE SERIES#
You will also see iTunes here, which will be filled with whatever music you store on your Mac – which can take up tons of GB unless you subscribe to Apple Music or iTunes Match to store your music in the cloud. IOS apps can take up a lot of space, so you can quickly reclaim storage space this way.ĥ. On a more populous Mac, you’ll also see tabs for iOS files, which is helpful since if you’re backing up your iPhone or iPad to your Mac (or you have in the past), you might find loads of iOS apps out of luck – neither one of which you need to keep, as you can easily download everything you previously paid for.
#HOW TO FREE UP SPACE ON MAC HARD DRIVE SERIES#
You’ll also see a series of tabs on the left side of the window for Apps, Documents, GarageBand, iCloud Drive, Mail, Photos, and Trash. This will open another panel that will present you with four options: Store in iCloud, Optimize Storage, Empty Trash Automatically, and Reduce Clutter. If you are using any version of macOS starting with Sierra (for example, 10.14, 10.13, or 10.12), click the Manage button.
#HOW TO FREE UP SPACE ON MAC HARD DRIVE SOFTWARE#
Also, just over 15GB is set aside for the second volume, which we called Test (sort of a section where we run the beta software – this is how we created the partition / volume on our Mac).ģ. As a result, the storage on our Mac is predominantly dedicated to apps (red, 16.61GB), photos (yellow, 5.17GB), iTunes (purple, 2.29GB), mail (dark blue, 1GB), and Music. In Mojave, our photos are mostly in iCloud, like most of our files and everything on our desktop. This is how it looked to us when we worked with Sierra. At that time, we had over 92 GB of photos on our 121 GB disk and 738 MB of scrapable material. This has changed slightly in later versions of macOS, because now there is a lot of content that can be stored in iCloud. You will see a bar that indicates how much space is reserved for photos, system, apps, mail, and so on.
This will show you how much memory you have available and how it is being used.
Click the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen and choose About This Mac.Ģ.If you run out of storage, you will continue to see alerts with a link to storage settings where you can manage your storage. To access this section without this direct link, follow these steps:
#HOW TO FREE UP SPACE ON MAC HARD DRIVE HOW TO#
How to manage storage using macOSīack in 2016, with the launch of macOS Sierra, Apple introduced a new Optimized Storage feature that helps you delete old files or move things you don’t need on your Mac to the cloud. This feature is still available, although changes in High Sierra and Mojave may have changed what you see there (for example, if you use iCloud to store desktop files and iCloud Photo Library for your photos, you won’t see them here, but you you can see a huge chunk of “Other” or “System”. Running out of space can really hinder your computing: if you want your Mac to run smoothly, you need to make sure you always have something like 10 percent of your storage. So, in this article, we’ll walk you through the simple steps to help you free up space on your Mac. In the days of hard drives, we all had a lot of space on our Macs, but SSDs often have more limited capacity, and high-definition videos and other “important” files take up more space than ever.