Once you are there, you will see four sections as stated below: Free up space with Mac's built-in storage management featureĬontinuing from where you saw the storage overview (in case you missed that, click Apple logo > About This Mac > Storage), click Manage to see the recommended ways to optimize storage. Note: We suggest you back up your Mac with Time Machine before removing anything to avoid potential data loss or operating system corruption caused by maloperation. Move files to an external storage device.

Clean up iTunes backups for your iPhone and iPad.

Free up space with Mac's built-in storage management feature.

To make sure you delete all the possible unwanted files scattered around your Mac, we will elaborate on the top 12 tips on how to free up space on Mac. Now that you have a rough idea of what fills up your Mac hard drive, it's time for a thorough disk cleaning. If you find the Other category a big consumer of storage, you can clean up the Other storage to optimize Mac space. And the iOS files on your Mac will also show there if had.įiles that don't easily fall into a clear category are classified as Other, such as installer packages, cache files, browser extensions, temporary files, and so on. In the example below, the internal hard drive stores six types of data - Music, Apps, Photos, macOS, System data, and Other storage. To know how much space is allocated to what category, hover over the cursor to a segment. Here you can see a bar segmented in different colors. To get a clear picture of how your Mac storage is used and how much is still available, you need to click the Apple menu at the top-left corner, then click About This Mac > Storage. How to check storage for MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and other Mac Models? FAQ about how to free up space on Macintosh HD Guide to freeing up space on Macintosh HD: No time should be wasted follow this comprehensive guide on how to free up space on Macintosh HD to stop unneeded files from eating up your Mac.

These are indeed good efforts, but there are more you can do to reclaim disk space, such as deleting purgeable space, removing system logs, deleting duplicate files, clearing browser caches, etc. Upon which, the first thing that pops up in your head is to find large files on Mac that you no longer need and delete them, likely from your Desktop, the Downloads folder, or the Applications folder. If you don't know whether your hard drive is full, you can check free disk space on Mac first. When your Mac hard drive is running out of space or has the error ' deleting files but not freeing space', you may face the consequences of not being able to save large files to it, update to the latest macOS Monterey, run programs smoothly, or even start up your Mac.

How to clear disc space mac