In macOS High Sierra and earlier, you can install Windows 10, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7 using Boot Camp Assistant on supported Mac models. Information about products not manufactured by Apple, or independent websites not controlled or tested by Apple, is provided without recommendation. Sep 29, 2019 But, you might need to free up space on your Mac. If so, you should remove the partition. Decide whether to do a clean install of macOS Catalina or carry over your current settings. Some people prefer erasing their hard drive and starting over from scratch. With so many cloud-based storage services, it's much easier than it used to be to do a.
![]()
Even in 2018, MacBooks still have tiny hard drives that fill up quickly. Luckily there are quick and easy ways to free up space on your hard drive. Here’s how to clean up your Mac and reclaim some drive space.You can obviously free up disk space by simply doing a cursory find-and-delete for big files and other things that you’ve downloaded, but realistically that’s only going to get you so far.
Most of the wasted space on your Mac is only going to be reclaimed if you look at lot deeper—cleaning out language files, removing duplicate files, deleting attachments, clearing temporary files, or emptying all of the Trash cans.If you fail to keep your Mac’s hard drive clean, you’re eventually going to get the dreaded “Your disk is almost full” error, so you may as well start now and clear up some space. How to Clean Up Your Mac the Easy WayIf you don’t feel like spending a bunch of time to find and clean things up manually, you can use to get rid of temporary files, clean up extra language files, uninstall applications, get rid of extra files left behind by application uninstallations, find and get rid of big attachments stored in Mail, and a whole lot more.It basically has all the features of the cleaning applications we talk about in this article, but in a single app—with the exception of finding duplicate files, which you’ll still want to use for. Luckily it’s the same vendor that makes Gemini 2 and.And of course, there’s a free trial that shows where your free space has gone and lets you clean up some of it for free. They have a single button to clean up everything, but we’d recommend going into the details to make sure.Note: before running any cleaning tool, you should make sure that all of your important data is backed up, just in case. Find and Remove Duplicate FilesOne of the trickiest things that can take up lots of drive space are duplicate files littering up your computer—this is especially true if you’ve been using the computer for a long time. Luckily there are great apps like that can be used to find and remove duplicate files with a really slick and easy interface.You can buy it on the App Store if you want — Apple had this one as their Editors’ Choice, but you’re probably better off, because they have a free trial available there.There are a lot of other choices on the App Store and elsewhere, but we’ve used this one and had good results. Empty Your Trash CansThe Trash on a Mac is equivalent to.
Rather than permanently deleting files from within the Finder, they are sent to your Trash so you can restore them later if you change your mind. To completely remove these files and free up the space they require, you’ll have to empty your Trash. But Macs can actually have multiple trash cans, so you may need to empty several.To empty your user account’s main trash can, Ctrl-click or right-click the Trash icon at the bottom-right corner of the dock and select Empty Trash.
This will delete all the files you sent to the trash from the Finder.iPhoto, iMovie, and Mail all have their own trash cans. If you’ve deleted media files from within these applications, you’ll need to empty their trash cans, too. For example, if you use iPhoto to manage your pictures and delete them in iPhoto, you’ll have to clear the iPhoto trash to remove them from your hard drive. To do this, just Ctrl+click or right-click the Trash option in that specific application and select Empty Trash.Uninstall Applications You Don’t UseThe applications you have installed on your Mac are taking up space, of course. You should uninstall them if you don’t need them—just open a Finder window, select Applications in the sidebar, and drag-and-drop the application’s icon to the trash can on your dock. Some of these applications can be taking up a ton of space.To find out which applications are using up the most space, open a Finder window and select Applications.
Click the “Show items in a list” icon on the toolbar and then click the Size heading to sort your installed applications by size.Clean Up the Huge iTunes Backups of Your iPhone or iPadIf you’ve backed up your iPhone or iPad to your Mac using iTunes, you’ve probably got a bunch of massive backup files that are taking up a shocking amount of space. We were able to clear up over 200 GB of space by finding and deleting some of these backup files.To delete them manually, you can open up the following path to see the backup folders, which will have random names, and you can delete the folders found inside. You’ll probably want to close iTunes before you do that./Library/Application Support/MobileSync/BackupThe easier (and much safer) way to delete them is to use, which translates those confusing folders into actual backup names so you can decide which backup you actually want to delete. Just check the things you want to remove, and then click the Clean button.Clear Out Temporary FilesYour Mac’s hard drive probably has temporary files you don’t need. These files often take up disk space for no good reason.
Mac OS X tries to automatically remove temporary files, but a dedicated application will likely find more files to clean up. Cleaning temporary files won’t necessarily speed up your Mac, but it will free up some of that precious disk space.Your web browser has a built-in option to clear out browsing data that you can use to quickly clear up a bit of space—but it’s not necessarily a great idea. These caches contain files from web pages so your browser can load the web pages faster in the future. Your web browser will automatically start rebuilding the cache as you browse, and it will just slow down web page load times as your browser’s cache grows again.
![]()
Each browser limits its cache to a maximum amount of disk space, anyway.There are a lot of other temporary files on your system, which you can see by opening up Finder, using Go - Go to Folder on the menu, and using /Library/Caches to get to the cache folder. This will pull up a folder that has a ton of folders in it, which you can select and delete manually if you choose.You can clean up temporary files easier, and much safer, by using. Just open it up and run through a scan, and then go into the System Junk section to identify all of the cache files and other things that you can clean up. Once you’ve selected what you want or don’t want to clean, just click the Clean button.One of the things that makes a utility like CleanMyMac so great is that it converts a lot of those confusing folder names into the names of the actual applications, so you can see which temporary files you’re actually deleting.The thing about temporary files, of course, is that most of them are going to come back after you use your Mac for a while. So deleting temporary files is great, but only works for a while. Check Your Disk to See What is Taking Up Space and Find Large FilesTo free up disk space, it’s helpful to know exactly what is using disk space on your Mac.
A hard disk analysis tool like will scan your Mac’s hard disk and display which folders and files are using up the most space. You can then delete these space hogs to free up space.If you care about these files, you may want to move them to external media — for example, if you have large video files, you may want to store them on an external hard drive rather than on your Mac.Bear in mind that you don’t want to delete any important system files. Your personal files are located under /Users/name, and these are the files you’ll want to focus on.Remove Language FilesMac applications come with language files for every language they support.
You can switch your Mac’s system language and start using the applications in that language immediately. However, you probably just use a single language on your Mac, so those language files are just using hundreds of megabytes of space for no good reason.
If you’re trying to squeeze as many files as you can onto that 64 GB MacBook Air, that extra storage space can be useful.To remove the extra language files, you can use, as we’ve mentioned earlier (It’s under System Junk - Language Files). There’s also another tool called that can delete these as well, though it’s yet another tool to download for a very specific use.
![]() Comments are closed.
|
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2023
Categories |