#HOW TO FREE UP MAC HARD DRIVE SPACE INSTALL#
#HOW TO FREE UP MAC HARD DRIVE SPACE UPDATE#
#HOW TO FREE UP MAC HARD DRIVE SPACE FULL#
#HOW TO FREE UP MAC HARD DRIVE SPACE TV#

#HOW TO FREE UP MAC HARD DRIVE SPACE FULL#

Select the Privacy tab and then select Full Disk Access on the left. Wait! Quit and open System Preferences > Security & Privacy. However, this app is completely safe, so ignore the warning and open it anyway.Ī list of the internal and external disk drives attached to the Mac is shown and you just click the one to explore. It will not let you run it straight away because it did not come from the Apple Mac Store. Run OmniDiskSweeper and macOS security kicks in. It is a small app that uses little disk space itself.

#HOW TO FREE UP MAC HARD DRIVE SPACE INSTALL#

Drag the app to the Applications folder to install it. Space hogging files and folders can be removed.ĭownload OmniDiskSweeper and double click the.

It scans the disk, sorts everything by size, and let's you browse the results and see what is using the most space. OmniDiskSweeper is a free utility that enables you to explore the disk drive and view the folders and files it contains.

#HOW TO FREE UP MAC HARD DRIVE SPACE UPDATE#

It can also be quite slow to navigate, sometimes taking a minute or so to scan the drive and update the view. Managing the disk contents using the features built into macOS is useful for some things, but not for others. They can be downloaded again if you ever need them. Some of the other categories in the sidebar are useful and if you never use GarageBand for example, you can free up a couple of gigabytes of disk space by removing the sound files and tutorials. This file display does not show everything on the Mac, but it does show the most important. Select a file and there is an button at the bottom of the window to delete it. Unsuported apps, like 32-bit ones in macOS Catalina, can be displayed too. There is a separate tab to show Large Files or Downloads. The location is not displayed, but only files in your home folder are shown, which narrows it down a little. It does not show files or locations and Documents for example, refers to files you created and not the Documents folder on the disk.įiles are displays and they are sorted by size, with the largest first. This is more useful and the sidebar breaks down the drive space usage by category. It is too general to enable you to take any action to free up space. It does not provide any details, so you don't know exactly what is using the space. It depends on your MacBook, but it can take a minute or two to produce the results. You can easily see how much free space is on each drive and by letting the mouse hover over a coloured section of the space usage bar, you can see what is using the space. Select the Storage tab and all the drives, internal and external, are listed.

Go to the Apple Menu and select About This Mac. Here we look at a couple of ways to see what is using the most disk space. They enable you to instantly see which folders and files are using the most storage space and knowing this, you can then do something about it, such as deleting big files or moving them to external storage like a USB disk drive.įirst we will look at features built into macOS and then use a free utility called OmniDiskSweeper.

If the Mac's drive is nearly full, what can you do? Obviously, you need to delete files to free up space, but which ones? Being able to see which files and folders use the most space is essential and it is pointless deleting small files that use little space. Even if you pay extra for a bigger drive when you buy your Mac (don't under estimate storage requirements), you could still run out of space.

#HOW TO FREE UP MAC HARD DRIVE SPACE TV#

That is a very small amount of storage for a modern computer that works with apps, games, digital photos, movies, TV shows, podcasts and music. There should not be many of those models till running, but even today, there are MacBooks being sold by Apple with just 128 GB SSDs. Yes, the MacBook Air a few years ago had just 64 GB of storage space. However, the switch to solid-state drives (SSDs) had a serious affect on space a drives dropped to just 64 GB. Hard disk drives teadily increased in size over time and storage space problems disappeared. Some MacBooks have 128 GB SSDs, which can cause serious space problems. Apple MacBook base models have limited storage space and it is easy to fill small drives.

How to free up mac hard drive space