Many people advocate clearing these caches occasionally to free up space, but unlike the above tricks, clearing temporary files only helps you.well, temporarily. Your computer keeps a collection of temporary files on its hard drive so it can re-access them later. It may not be the prettiest disk space analyzer available for macOS, but it's free and offers an exhaustive list of which folders, files, and file types are hogging your hard drive. If you don't have macOS Sierra, or you want to drill down even further into your system, you can accomplish similar things with a tool like Disk Inventory X (Opens in a new window). (Just don't forget to empty the Trash when you're done-if files are in the Trash, they're still taking up space on your Mac!) Right-click any of these files to delete them, and you should be able to free up a decent amount of space. For example, you may find that you have multiple gigabytes of video from an old project you no longer need, or huge iOS backups from devices you no longer own. The left sidebar shows you each of the aforementioned categories, and you can click on them to see the biggest files of that type. If you discover you have 100GB of music on a 128GB drive, for example, then it's a fair bet you should clean up that iTunes library.Ĭlick the Manage button and you will have the option to see a much more detailed breakdown. If that overview says you're running macOS 10.12 Sierra or higher, then you can merely click the Storage tab to get a basic idea of what's taking up so much space on your drive-like documents, photos, music, and so on. Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the menu bar and choose About This Mac. The bigger the files you can delete, the more space you can free up-so let's go hunting. How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication.How to Record the Screen on Your Windows PC or Mac.How to Convert YouTube Videos to MP3 Files.How to Save Money on Your Cell Phone Bill.How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad.How to Block Robotexts and Spam Messages.

How to manage disk space on mac