Click the drive you want to search, open the search window, and hit the + button next to the “Save” button at the top right.
RELATED: How to Free Up Disk Space on a Mac Find Large Files Manuallyįinder has a built-in way for finding large files with Spotlight search. It also has a tab that lets you view large files, albeit in a list view rather than the partitioned interfaces of Disk Inventory or DaisyDisk. It then clears them out for you automatically.ĬleanMyMac also has some other useful tools, such as an Uninstaller for cleaning up old applications, maintenance scripts, and a shredder for securely deleting files. When you launch the app, it performs a scan of your drive, looking in those junk and cache folders that you may miss in Disk Inventory. This is where an automated tool like Clean My Mac X comes in handy. The easiest tool to use to clean up large and old files is Clean My Mac X, which has an entire module called “Large & Old Files” that can be used to clean up all the huge junk on your Mac.Īnd while you can manually find and delete large files, there is also a lot of system junk and temporary caches that can take up a lot of space-and are often hidden in system folders you don’t want to touch. Find and Clean Up Large Files the Easy Way
The Trash folder in macOS also can take up quite a bit of space if you haven’t emptied it in a while, so it’s worth taking a look to see if you’re still storing some large files. That folder is located here: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backupĭepending on how big your device is, and how often you back up, these backup files can take up tens of gigabytes. One such place that can take up a lot of space is the folder where iTunes saves backups of your iPhone or iPad. The Downloads is one of them, and a lot of people fill it up and forget to empty it, but files are hiding in places you wouldn’t expect.
Most of your files will only be in a couple of folders. Ready to get your disk cleaned up? Check The Most Likely Places However, there are some excellent tools for macOS that let you find the files taking up the most space and delete the ones you don’t need. All Rights Reserved.Freeing up disk space on a full hard drive can be difficult, especially when it’s full of small files. With speeds like that, who needs a new Mac? (But I really want that new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display.)Ĭopyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Your old Mac should benefit from app opening and switching that's twice its current speed. More importantly, Apple is promising big performance gains this fall with the free OS X El Capitan update.
You can check to see if you have an update in the App Store. It may seem obvious but Apple is constantly improving performance, even small updates like the recent OS X 10.10.3 has small performance and stability tweaks.
Those constant Mac OS update popups are annoying, but stop dismissing them and just hit update. I disabled a handful of apps-including ones from Fitbit and Canon, which weren’t appearing in my dock-from launching at startup. In System Preferences, I opened Users & Groups then looked at Login Items. But I also discovered a number of apps that launched every time I reboot my computer, slowing down the system in the background but providing no immediate value for me. In the process, I deleted a handful of applications I don’t use anymore, too.