Speaking of System Updates, if you’ve downloaded them but haven’t installed them yet, they’re just sitting around taking up disk space on your Mac. It’s a good idea to reboot a Mac with some regularity, even if it’s only once a month or so to install the OS X system updates that come out periodically. Both of these files will be cleared when a Mac is rebooted, in the example below these two temporary files accounted for 21GB of disk space alone, though this was on a Mac that hadn’t been rebooted in five months. Swap files are basically things that are no longer active in memory and then swapped to storage on disk, and the sleepimage file is basically a duplication of what’s in current memory so it can be retrieved when a Mac is woken from sleep. The latter two can grow quite large if you rarely reboot a Mac.

Though we rarely reboot our Macs around here, rebooting a Mac will almost always free up a fair amount of disk space, simply because it flushes system caches, some app caches, installs system updates, and perhaps more significantly, the virtual memory swap files and sleep image files. 3: Reboot the Mac & Install System Updates DMG file, zip file, or archive it came from.

Jump to your ~/Downloads directory and sort by file size, then delete anything (everything) you don’t need any more.Ī good future habit to help manage the downloads directory is this: once you install an app, delete the installer. The user downloads folder is notorious for growing gigantic when left unchecked for a while, and it’s often the easiest pickings. It’s a good idea to relaunch apps from time to time for this reason, particularly web browsers. You can also delete the cache files manually, but it’s much easier to just relaunch your apps and have the OS clear it for you. If you haven’t quit these apps in a long time, those cache files continue to grow, and generally they aren’t cleared out until the app is quit.

If you’re not sure which files in the iCloud Drive window occupy the most space, choose View > As List, and then click the Size column so the largest files sort to the top (click again if they’re sorting to the bottom).Here are five quick tips to free up space on a hard drive with Mac OS X…Īpps like Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Photoshop, Spotify, and many others, create temporary cache files while they’re in use. The file remains in iCloud Drive, and if you need it locally, you can click the cloud icon next to its name to download it. Open iCloud Drive in the Finder, Control-click a file, and choose Remove Download. However, you may wish to recover local storage space without selecting that option-luckily, that’s easy to do. With iCloud Drive, Apple provides an Optimize Mac Storage checkbox that, when checked, stores the full contents of iCloud Drive on the Mac only if there’s enough space. Free Up Disk Space by Removing iCloud Drive Downloads

Clear up disk space mac