How To Free Space On Mac Hard Drive

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Even with all of the space some Mac users can enjoy - depending on the size of the hard drive you bought — they always run out of room eventually. Sooner or later, a Mac starts to slow down, even overheat, and the space you need is no longer there. Here are ways you can free up space when your Mac hard drive is full.

How to check Mac hard drive space

To start with, it always helps to know what is taking up so much space on your Mac before you start deleting files and folders.

Click on the Apple icon in the top left corner
Select About this Mac > Storage

Another way to see what is taking up space is within System and User files. Next to every folder and application your Mac displays how much space everything uses and therefore makes it easier to judge what to delete.

What system files can be deleted safely?


Depending on your user habits, there could be tons of various junk on your Mac. Some of it can be safely destroyed because these files are either outdated or never been used.

How to find your biggest space hoggers

Yes, you could spend a few hours in Finder sorting your archives and documents. The problem is all folders in Finder look the same. Is there a quicker way to find out where is your space going? Yes, and it's called 'Space Lens.'

Space Lens is an amazing little tool that is part of CleanMyMac X. It creates the interactive map of your storage so you can explore it and at a glance see the largest space wasters. A quick way to see what is taking up so much space, and then in a few clicks, remove and delete anything taking up too much room, or that you've forgotten about and need to clear out.

  1. Get a free version of CleanMyMac X
  2. Launch the app and click Space Lens in the sidebar

These 'bubbles' are your folders of different size. You can even find the folders that are regularly hidden away.

How to clean up Mac hard drive space?

Here are few tips that would help you to unload your hard drive.

1. Delete unnecessary apps and games

Most of us will have games, apps and other content that is no longer needed taking up hard drive space. Even Mac’s, with as much memory as some of them are equipped with, run out of space eventually. If “Your disk is almost full” is a problem you’ve encountered, you need to follow these steps to free hard drive space on a Mac.

Go to the Applications folder.

Search through and see what you don't need anymore. Make a list of these, because once they're out of the Applications folder there is a chance you need to check in other places around your Mac to find other traces of the same apps, in case there are folders and system files stored elsewhere.

Drag-and-drop the unwanted apps and games into the Trash.

And then search in Library and other hidden folders for other traces and elements of the apps and games that you’ve deleted. Once you’re sure you’ve got everything, empty the Trash. It is also worth restarting your Mac, just to make sure you've removed everything and your Mac is operating at peak performance again.

2. Clear out duplicates

Duplicates can be lurking around hard drives in a number of ways.

Usually this is a problem when you’ve copied multiple documents, or more often than not, when you’ve got more than one of the same picture. Or many pictures that are very similar. Another way this is an issue is when you’ve got a Mac that used to have - or inherited from a previous Mac — an iPhotos album. Whereas macOS comes equipped with the Photos app, so there is a risk that your Mac is full of duplicate photos.

Before you delete the ones you don't need, make sure the ones you want are saved in the right folder, or moved over into an external or cloud-based hard drive. Then delete everything that is taking up too much space.
BTW, our favorite app to delete duplicates is Gemini 2 — give it a try.

3. Watch out for backups

Another problem that is commonly encountered on Mac’s are backups from iOS devices. Although most backups are now done in the cloud, there are still millions of Mac’s with iPod, iPhone and iPad backups still taking up hard drive space.

How To Free Space On Mac Hard Drive Replacement

You should be able to find these within iTunes. If you want to delete them, close iTunes then go to the following folder within Library:
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup.

Now you can take all of these unnecessary backups to the Trash, then empty it to free up space.

4. Empty Trash and email downloads

Another way to free up much-needed space is to empty to Trash, and clear out months or years worth of email Downloads. Once you’ve emptied the main Trash in the right-hand side of the Dock, it is also worth checking in the iTunes, Photos, Mail and iMovie applications - if you've used any of those recently - as they also have their own Trash functions, so make sure to clear those out too.

Whether or not you use Mail, or a third-party or browser-based email application, downloads go into the same folder. You could be sitting on months or years worth of downloads.
To see your Mail Downloads:
Open Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder...
Type in: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.<strong>mail</strong>/Data/Library/<strong>Mail Downloads</strong>/


See what's inside and delete it if necessary.

5. Free up more space with CleanMyMac X

These are several third-party tools you can use to create more space on a Mac. It's entirely up to you to find the best cleaning partner for your Mac — but beware of scam Mac cleaners. When you see 'Your Mac is infected' message, don't fall for it — it's a trap.
But that said, there are also reliable junk removers, like CleanMyMac X. For example, CleanMyMac X is notarized by Apple and doesn't contain any malicious components.
Here is what CleanMyMac X can clean on your Mac:

  • Large & Old files
  • System Junk
  • Unseen applications
  • iTunes and Photo junk

The user interface looks like this:

According to the developer's site, an average user locates up to 74 GB of junk to clear out using the app.

CleanMyMac X is available for a free download here

Okay we've told you how to delete your apps, games, photos, and other folders taking up space. Hopefully, you can get your Mac working at peak performance again.

Today in 2021, MacBooks are more spacious than ever. The new MacBook Air comes with a 256-GB hard drive. But no amount of storage seems to be enough as the ever-inflating digital media is taking over our hard drives. Cloud servers are only a partial answer to that. They aren’t getting cheaper and consume insane amounts of the world’s electricity. So if you want to take a load off your drive and help the planet, you should teach yourself a couple of storage-keeping tricks. Let’s go.

How to free up space on your hard drive mac

What’s causing low disk space on your Mac?

Before you begin to free up disk space, let’s identify what’s taking it up. From the Apple Menu in the upper left-hand corner of your screen, select About This Mac and then click the Storage tab in the window that opens. You’ll get a handy, color-coded graph that looks like this:

In the above example, you can see that apps, audio files, and “other” (for details on what this “other” category consists of, look here) are taking the most significant amount of space.

It’s nice to see what’s stored on your Mac, and even nicer to be able to browse the folders that contain the files themselves. Now that you’ve identified what’s on your drive let’s free up some space.

How to increase disk space on your Mac

There are several options here, so let’s go through a few.

1. Remove large and old files

Often the files that end up taking the most space are tucked away in “cold storage” on your computer. These are big movies, photos, or the like that you rarely look at but can’t part with, either. In this case, archiving the files and moving them to an external drive is a good way to free up storage space on your Mac.
Locating huge neglected files can be a pain, but it gets super easy with the CleanMyMac X app. It has a dedicated Large & Old File finder. It will help you find massive files and sort them by size to define the largest ones quickly.

You can download the free version of CleanMyMac X here.

As the name suggests, it finds files that occupy a lot of space on your disk but haven’t been opened for a long time. You can quickly review these files right in the app and decide which ones you want to remove. It’s a really handy feature if you have a lot of heavy stuff piled up.

2. Empty Trash

Review your Trash bin’s contents one last time before you empty it. Press Command and right-click the Trash folder on your Trash icon. Then, click Empty Trash to remove everything.

Use Command-Option-Delete to delete any folder immediately, bypassing Trash.

3. Clean up the Downloads folder

Files love to hide in your Mac’s Downloads folder. Old disk images, random photos, unused extensions, ZIP files… they’re all in there, not making a sound. Hiding. ? Go to Finder and browse what’s sitting in your Downloads, wasting space on your disk. Anything unnecessary can be dragged to the Trash.

4. Delete duplicate folders and files

How many times do we copy or download things twice? Like many users, I would prefer to have a backup twin of my important files. But that often ends up in my files being quadrupled…or what do they call a 4th or 5th copy of the same folder?

To effectively remove duplicate files and make space on Mac, you can use Gemini 2. This is how this app looks.

You can download this little duplicate finder here.

Gemini 2 analyzes potential duplicates by many criteria, not just the name of the file. It searches for:

  • Duplicate folders
  • Duplicate movies
  • Similar images

5. Learn to use Optimized Storage

Optimized Storage is the built-in feature of the macOS. It’s a sorting algorithm that shows different categories of files on your Mac for review and removal.

  1. Click the Apple Menu > About This Mac > Storage.
  2. Choose “Manage…”

By far, the most-space demanding of your files will be Applications.

Using the quick tabs above, you will decide what is there you can toss away. Make sure also to check Recommendations (on top of the list). There are a couple more space-saving options there.

6. Uninstall unused applications

If you’re like me, you often try an app “...just to see what it does”. While that’s fun, it frequently results in a slew of forgotten apps. It’s a good practice to set a reminder to review your Applications folder and clean out the ones you no longer use. However, note that simply dragging an app into your Mac’s trash doesn’t eliminate all of its related files.

CleanMyMac X's Uninstaller feature, on the other hand, leaves no leftover pieces behind, which means more available space on your Mac. CleanMyMac X finds every app-related document and file, no matter where it has been tucked away and deletes it from your Mac.

And speaking of setting up a reminder, CleanMyMac’s scheduler will handle that task for you, too. Just tell it how often you’d like to be prompted to give your Mac a good cleaning and leave the rest to the app.

7. Delete your Desktop screenshots

Mac’s Desktop is where you keep screenshots by default. With a feature called “Stacks,” you can organize your Desktop into clearly labeled folders. One of such folders will be Screenshots, which you can later remove in one sweep.

  1. Go to your desktop.
  2. Right-click somewhere in the middle of your Desktop.
  3. Select “Use Stacks”

Now you should see the Screenshots folder with all your screengrabs neatly stuffed inside. Drag this folder to the Trash and empty it.

8. Get rid of system junk

How To Free Space On Mac Hard Drive Icon

It’s not just your files that are hogging disk space — it’s also useless system files like logs, cache, unused binaries, old iOS backups and installers, and what not. Fortunately, CleanMyMac can find and eliminate them all to make low disk space a thing of the past, at last.

System junk is comprised of:

  • User cache files
  • Application cache
  • Broken downloads
  • Unused .DMG installers

As you can see, the 'User cache' category alone can recover about 3 GB of space. So the best way to free up space on Mac is to start with this type of files.

With just a few clicks, you’ll discover what’s where and what’s ripe for deletion. The best way to free up hard drive space is to run CleanMyMac X and wave goodbye to space-hogging files. Don’t worry. You won’t miss them. Hopefully, you managed to clear a lot of disk space — drop by for more Mac housekeeping tips. 😉