Today, in 2020, MacBooks are more spacious than ever. The new MacBook Air 2020 is confirmed to be shipped 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.
The SSD of the Air is a 'working platform' computer. Your best practical option is buying a 1TB external HD for $65 and offload BIG FILES. Regardless of the size of your SSD, you need an external backup for time machine and same for important file storage. Use Startup Manager or Startup Disk preferences to select the bootable installer as the startup disk, then start up from it. Your Mac will start up to macOS Recovery. Learn about selecting a startup disk, including what to do if your Mac doesn't start up from it. Choose your language, if prompted. Step 1 – Checking Available Disk Space. In order to successfully free up some disk space on your Mac, you first need to know what is actually eating up so much precious space. To do this, click on the Apple menu in the top left corner and then choose the “About This Mac” option.
That’s the bad news. Now for the good. There are several simple ways to fix the low disk space problem, including one we’re especially fond of: wiping out junk files with a cleaner app. We recommend CleanMyMac X — it removes system junk and empties multiple trashes to free up disk space on your Mac. You can download it now and get cleaning right away, or take a look at some DIY ways first.
If you don’t know how to check your disk space use on your Mac, here’s where to look. Options 1 and 2: From the Finder. The Finder gives you a couple ways to see how much free disk space you have.
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) have commandeered most of the disk’s available 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 look up at freeing up some space.
There are several options here, so let’s go through a few.
Often times 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 CleanMyMac app. It has a dedicated Large & Old File finder. With it you can find some massive documents and sort them by type, last used, and more criteria.
You can download the free version of CleanMyMac X here.
Macbook pro no video. 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 archive. to see how it works, it’s a really handy feature if you have a lot of heavy stuff piled up.
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. Just note, however, that simply dragging an app into your Mac’s trash doesn’t eliminate all of its related files.
CleanMyMac’s App Uninstaller, on the other hand, leaves no leftover pieces behind, which means more available space on your Mac. When told to delete an app, CleanMyMac X finds every related document and file, no matter where it has been tucked away, and marks it for deletion.
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.
Review your Trash bin’s contents one last time before you empty it. Click on your Trash and click the Empty button that is found to the right of the pane.
Tip: Use Command + Option + Delete to delete any folder immediately bypassing Trash.
Files love to hide in your Mac’s Downloads folder. Old disk images, random photos, unused extensions, ZIP files… they’re in there, not making a sound. Hiding. ?lick the Downloads stack in the OS X Dock and browse what’s sitting in there, wasting space on your disk. Anything that’s unnecessary can be dragged to the Trash.
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:
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.
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