Even these days, MacBooks still have tiny hard drives that fill up quickly. Click on your Mac's startup drive in the Disk Utility sidebar. It should be the drive at the top of the sidebar if there are multiple drives. First Aid will run, checking the health of your Mac's drive.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 CleanMyMac 3 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 Gemini 2 for. 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. 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.
Find Disk Utility For My Apple Notebook Trial Available ThereTo completely remove these files and free up the space they require, you’ll have to empty your Trash. 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. Empty Your Trash CansThe Trash on a Mac is equivalent to the Recycle Bin on Windows. Luckily there are great apps like Gemini 2 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 getting it from their website, 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. 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. 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.![]() 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. 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. To do this, just Ctrl+click or right-click the Trash option in that specific application and select Empty Trash.The applications you have installed on your Mac are taking up space, of course. 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. If you’ve deleted media files from within these applications, you’ll need to empty their trash cans, too. This will delete all the files you sent to the trash from the Finder.IPhoto, iMovie, and Mail all have their own trash cans. ![]() 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. 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 CleanMyMac. 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. Chrome for mac ftp clientYou 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. A hard disk analysis tool like Disk Inventory X will scan your Mac’s hard disk and display which folders and files are using up the most space. 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. So deleting temporary files is great, but only works for a while. If you’re using Gmail, you can set limits on how many messages are synced over IMAP by default to only show the last few thousand instead of everything. Removing language files is only necessary if you really want the space—those language files aren’t slowing you down, so keeping them is no problem if you have a big hard disk with more than enough free space.If you’re using the built-in Mail application in macOS and you’ve had the same email account for a long time, there’s a good chance that large email attachments are taking up a ton of space on your drive—sometimes many gigabytes worth, so this is a good place to check while cleaning up your drive.RELATED: How to Stop Your Mac's Mail App From Wasting Gigabytes of SpaceYou can change the Mail settings to not download attachments automatically to save space, or run a cleanup tool to get rid of them. There’s also another tool called Monolingual that can delete these as well, though it’s yet another tool to download for a very specific use. 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 CleanMyMac, as we’ve mentioned earlier (It’s under System Junk -> Language Files). 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. You can switch your Mac’s system language and start using the applications in that language immediately. Click on the message, and choose Message -> Remove Attachments from the menu bar. Use the Sort by Size option to find the biggest messages. Open up Mail, and click on the folder that you want to find and remove attachments for.
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