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7 Handy Tips To Free Up Space On Mac

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The hard drives in MacBooks fill up rather quickly. Failing to keep your Mac’s hard drive clean will eventually lead to getting the “Your disk is almost full” error. You can free up space on Mac by storing your files, photos, movies, email attachments, and other files in iCloud and accessing it on-demand. All the files stay right where you last saved it and it first downloads when you wish to access it.                                                    

Whether you have the latest Mac or an old one, you should know how to clear system storage on your device. 

Full hard drives- affecting Mac

Your MacBook will slow down in case your drive reaches about 70- 80% of its capacity. This is partly because of fragmenting. When only a little space is left on your disk, your Mac divides every new file into fragments and fit them at available slots on your device, slowing down the procedure of processing these files. Plus, some amount of your RAM will also be used for the loss of disk space.

How to free up space on Mac?

The various ways to clear space on Mac are: 

1. By removing the language files

The applications in MacBook have language files for every language they support. Users can easily switch their Mac’s system language and use the applications in their preferred language. A single language on your Mac comprises language files that are using hundreds of megabytes of space. You should compress as many files as you can to use the extra storage space.  

For removing the extra language files, you can either use a tool called Monolingual or CleanMyMac. It becomes mandatory to remove language files only when you need the space. 

2.  By removing the browser cache

If you regularly use the internet, your Mac’s drive might be full of the browser cache due to this reason. While you are on the net, you often visit various sites that leave bookmarks on your drive. 

Here is how to remove the browser cache in Safari and Chrome:

  • To clear cache from Safari

Step 1: First, you need to click on the ‘Develop’ option in the top menu.

Step 2:Then you need to click on the ‘Empty caches’ option.

  • To clear cache from Chrome

Step 1: At first, you need to click on the ‘three-dot icon’, present at the top right part of your device’s screen. 

Step 2: Now, you need to click on ‘More tools’ and search for the ‘Clear browsing data’ menu. 

Step 3: From ‘Clear browsing data’, you need to select a time range to clear the browsing data. 

Step 4: After clearing the browsing data, you need to remove the ‘Cached images and files’. 

3. By uninstalling the applications not being used

Remember, the applications you have installed on your MacBook, use space. You are suggested to uninstall them if they are not needed. 

  • To uninstall such applications:

Step 1: At first, you need to open the ‘Finder window’. 

Step 2: Then select the ‘Applications menu’ from the sidebar.

Please Note: Some applications take up a lot of space.

  • To find out which applications take up the maximum space:

Step 1:  You first need to open the ‘Finder window’ and select the ‘Applications menu’. 

Step 2: Now, you need to click on the ‘Show items in a list’ icon, present on the toolbar.

Step 3: After that, you need to click on the ‘Size heading’ option for sorting your installed applications by size.

4. By removing the temporary files

Every Macbook’s hard drive often has temporary files that its user doesn’t need. These files cover-up disk space unnecessarily. Cleaning temporary files won’t ensure speeding up your device, but it will free up some of the disk storage space.

Note: Mac OS X tries to remove temporary files automatically, but a dedicated application will likely find more files to clean up. 

Mac’s web browser comes along with a built-in option for clearing out your system’s browsing data that you can use for quickly clearing up a bit of space. 

The caches contain files from various web pages for enabling your browser to load the web pages faster afterwards. Your web browser automatically rebuilds the cache as you browse through the different websites, and it will just slow down the loading time as the cache builds again.

Most of the temporary files are going to come back after you use your Mac for a while. Thus deleting temporary files is a great help, but only works for a little time.

5. By clearing your desktop 

If your device runs on macOS Mojave or Catalina, you can click anywhere in the middle of your desktop’s screen and then choose the ‘Use Stacks’ option from the window that appears. You will notice that all the things there are neatly sorted under various categories. From there, you can sort all the items by size and delete all the screenshots or other such files that are present there.

Please Note: In the macOS High Sierra, or some earlier version, one will need to clear the disk space on their Mac Desktop manually. 

6. By trashing the iPhone backups 

Often we keep the Outdated iPhone backups in our Mac which in turn takes enormous space. After you synchronize your iPhone with iTunes, iTunes will be backing up your data. Thus this is responsible for your drive having outdated backups and growing out of proportion. 

 In case you have macOS Mojave or an older version of macOS:

Step 1: First, you need to click on ‘Finder.’

 Step 2: Now, you need to select the ‘Folder’ option. 

 Step 3: Then, you need to paste in:

“ ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup”

 Step 4: At last, you just need to move the folder’s insides to the ‘Trash’, and that’s it, you are good to go.

~ In case you have macOS 10.15 Catalina, then you need to: 

Step 1: First, you need to open the ‘Finder’. 

Step 2: Now go to the ‘Preferences’ menu.

Step 3:  Find and click on the ‘General’ option.

Step 4: From here, you need to click on the ‘Manage Backups’ option.

Step 5: After this, you just need to right-click on the particular backup’s name to see the “Show in Finder” command. 

Step 6: Now, you need to move that backup somewhere else or simply delete it.

Please Note: You are suggested to do this only if you are entirely sure that you don’t need your iPhone back up anymore.

7. By freeing up the storage space manually

~ You can even follow these manual steps to make more storage space available on your Mac:

Option 1: Often, movies, music, and other media files can use a lot of storage space on your Mac. When no longer in use, you should consider removing such files from your device. 

Option 2: You can even delete other files that you no longer need. You just need to move them to the Trash, and then simply empty it. 

Suggestion: The Downloads folder on your device is an excellent place to look for files that you might not need at all.

Option 3: You can move files to some external storage device.

Option 4: You can compress the files. 

Option 5: You can delete the emails that are not required.

For that, you can follow the given steps:

Step 1: At first, you need to choose the ‘Mailbox’ option from the’ Mail app’. 

Step 2: Next, you need to erase the ‘Junk Mail’. 

Step 3: If you do not need the email in your ‘Trash mailbox’, you can choose the ‘Mailbox’ and simply select the ‘Erase Deleted Items’ option.

Dear readers, we hope that this article taught you how to free up space on Mac. We have tons of other such technical topics which you might find helpful. 

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