A Complete Guide to Free Up Disk Space on Macintosh HD

When your Mac hard drive is running out of space or has the error 'deleting files but not freeing space', you may face the consequences of not being able to save large files to it, update to the latest macOS Monterey, run programs smoothly, or even start up your Mac. If you don't know whether your hard drive is full, you can check free disk space on Mac first.

Upon which, the first thing that pops up in your head is to find large files on Mac that you no longer need and delete them, likely from your Desktop, the Downloads folder, or the Applications folder.

These are indeed good efforts, but there are more you can do to reclaim disk space, such as deleting purgeable space, removing system logs, deleting duplicate files, clearing browser caches, etc. No time should be wasted; follow this comprehensive guide on how to free up space on Macintosh HD to stop unneeded files from eating up your Mac.

How to check storage for MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and other Mac Models?

To get a clear picture of how your Mac storage is used and how much is still available, you need to click the Apple menu at the top-left corner, then click About This Mac > Storage. Here you can see a bar segmented in different colors.

To know how much space is allocated to what category, hover over the cursor to a segment. In the example below, the internal hard drive stores six types of data - Music, Apps, Photos, macOS, System data, and Other storage. And the iOS files on your Mac will also show there if had.

Files that don't easily fall into a clear category are classified as Other, such as installer packages, cache files, browser extensions, temporary files, and so on. If you find the Other category a big consumer of storage, you can clean up the Other storage to optimize Mac space.

By the way, you may find the purgeable storage there. It is usually the culprit why your Mac says not enough space but there is.

How to free up space on Macintosh HD?

Now that you have a rough idea of what fills up your Mac hard drive, it's time for a thorough disk cleaning. To make sure you delete all the possible unwanted files scattered around your Mac, we will elaborate on the top 12 tips on how to free up space on Mac.

How to free up space on Mac?

• Free up space with Mac's built-in storage management feature
• Clear storage used by Virtual Machine
• Delete duplicate files
• Clear browser data
• Remove application & system logs
• Clean up iTunes backups for your iPhone and iPad
• Delete large attachments in Mail
• Remove unnecessary language files
• Clean your desktop
• Uninstall unwanted apps
• Move files to an external storage device
• Empty the Trash

Free up space with Mac's built-in storage management feature

Continuing from where you saw the storage overview (in case you missed that, click Apple logo > About This Mac > Storage), click Manage to see the recommended ways to optimize storage. Once you are there, you will see four sections as stated below:

Section 1: Store in iCloud

This feature allows you to store files in the Desktop and Documents folders, photos, and messages to iCloud to save space. But Apple only provides 5GB of free iCloud storage, so you have to pay if you need more or you will receive the notification saying that "iCloud storage is full". To store files in iCloud, click Store in iCloud, then check the boxes alongside the files you want to keep in iCloud.

Once this feature is turned on, it will automatically free up local space when your Mac is low on storage. You can also expect:

Desktop and Documents: Except for the recently opened files, the rest are stored in iCloud, downloadable by double-clicking the download icon - a cloud with an arrow pointing down.

Photos: Photos stored on Mac are optimized to save space. The original ones are kept in iCloud.

Messages: Only recently opened messages and attachments are saved on your Mac.

Section 2: Optimize Storage

You can turn on Optimize Storage to automatically delete TV shows and movies you purchased from iTunes after you have watched them.

Section 3: Empty Trash Automatically

Usually, people right-click on the Trash icon to empty the Trash, but you can automatize the process by enabling Empty Trash Automatically. This feature will automatically remove items moved to the Trash longer than 30 days.

To set up the automatic deletion of Trash, click the Empty Trash Automatically option and confirm the action by tapping on Turn on.

Section 4: Reduce Clutter

Click on Review Files, and you can see tabs for Large Files, the Downloads folder, a list of Unsupported Apps, Containers, and a File Browser that gives you quick access to the folders for Pictures, Music, Downloads, Movies, Documents, etc. You can go through these tabs one by one and press the Space bar to preview a selected item.

Once you decide what to delete, choose the file, then click the Delete button to dump it permanently. This may take some time as you thinking over files you want to delete, but it's worth the effect.

The next step is to view each category listed on the left and remove the unwanted files. You will also notice two groups of data greyed out in the list naming System/Other or macOS/System data. They are made inaccessible to prevent users from removing the files inside, causing data corruption or unexpected behaviours.

Clear storage used by Virtual Machine

If you run Windows on Mac with a virtual machine, the biggest culprit to storage shortage may be the undeleted files accumulated through each operating system update or other files and programs stored on its partition. To avoid unimportant data cluttering up your Mac, you can configure Windows to automatically free up disk space, then manually run a cleanup.

Delete duplicate files

Over time, your Mac will inevitably accumulate a large amount of duplicate files generated when you replicate documents or repeatedly download certain files such as app installers, online images, email attachments, and the like. Deleting these duplicates makes a great move to recycle wasted space for better intention.

To manually search for duplicate files:

If you use the Music app on Mac frequently, it has an easier way to find duplicate songs.

To find duplicate music files on Mac:

It takes time to search for duplicates manually. If you edit pictures or do tasks that produce duplicate files a lot, you can consider getting a free tool like MacClean or investing in paid software to do the job for you.

Clear browser data

When you use a web browser like Google, Safari, or Firefox, it saves information from the websites you visited in its cache and cookies. Your activities and preferences on a site are stored in Cookies to improve user experience. Although cookies expire automatically, it may pose a privacy issue since third parties can use them to track your browser history.

Unlike Cookies, Cache stores website contents such as images, documents for faster future retrieval. It takes up larger storage space and must be manually cleared. It's recommended to delete cookies on Mac every few weeks to free up some space and keep the browser running smoothly.

To clear Chrome's browser data:

If you want to stop third-party websites from tracking your activity or configure Google to remove cookies upon closing the browser window, follow these steps:

To clear Safari's browser data:

To clear Firefox's browser data:

Another way to locate caches is to open Finder, click the Go tab on the top, then select Go to Folder. Type in ~/Library/Caches and hit Enter to see all cache folders.

Remove application & system logs

Your Mac saves details about errors, crashes, and other issues that occurred in logs to help experts troubleshoot problems. However, these log files are not user-friendly and are almost useless to average users.

As time goes on, the log files will pile up and occupy the valuable space on your system drive. Given that deleting log files won't cause any damage to your Mac, it's advisable to clear them for more space.

To clear application and system logs on Mac:

Clean up iTunes backups for your iPhone and iPad

If you have backed up your iPad and iPhone with iTunes, there's likely a massive amount of backup files eating up your storage space. In this case, you need to close iTunes and go to the backup folders through this path: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup. The folders inside are randomly named, so you should review the contents before starting deletion.

Alternatively, you can delete the backups by opening iTunes and going to iTunes > Preferences > Devices. Here you will see a list of backups; select those you don't need and click Delete Backup. In addition, you can choose back up iPhone to external hard drive the next time to not strain the Mac disk space. 

Delete large attachments in Mail

As an important ingredient of daily life, emails don't take up much space but may carry many attachments, such as pictures, documents, etc. When you delete emails, these attachments stay on your Mac, taking a piece of your storage space.

Therefore, it's essential to delete mail storage on Mac, you can set up your Email app to delete the attachment once the email is gone. Also, the junk mails you receive now and then won't go away unless you delete them or configure the app to do so.

How to set up the Mail app to remove attachments and delete junk mails:

Remove unnecessary language files

Every application on your Mac came with pre-loaded languages files of many countries. But in reality, you only use one or two of them. That left the rest of the unused language files on your hard drive for no good reason. Since removing them doesn't impact your Mac, you can get rid of them to regain a few hundred megabytes or gigabytes of storage space.

To remove unused language files manually:

Some of the language and code names used on Mac:

You need to repeat this process for all apps on your Mac, which may take a while. Luckily, there's a freeware called Monolingual that can automate and speed up the process for you.

To remove extra language files with free third-party app:

Clean your desktop

Organizing your Mac desktop not only makes it better to look at, also frees up space. Take a look at your Desktop and move anything you don't need to the Trash.

There's a simple trick for users running macOS Mojave or later to organize stuff on your Mac. Click on the blank space of your Desktop, select Use Stacks, and then you will see your files neatly stacked in categories.

Uninstall unwanted apps

You can uninstall apps you haven't used for some time or no longer need in storage management. Or directly from Finder.

To delete unneeded apps on Mac:

Move files to an external storage device

When it comes to freeing up space on Mac, deleting files is the obvious choice. But that's a different story if you have large files like photos that you don't want to get rid of. In that case, besides storing them in the cloud, you can move them to a USB flash drive or a hard disk drive. Here is an example of moving Photos Library to an external hard drive:

Empty the Trash

When you delete a file on Mac, it often goes to the Trash can, which means these files are still on your Mac until you empty the Trash. So the last resort of freeing up disk space on Mac is to empty your Trash.

You can permanently delete files on a Mac by right-clicking on the Trash icon at your dock and choosing Empty Trash. You should make sure those files are unwanted, otherwise, it takes more effort to recover permanently deleted files on Mac. For apps like Photos, iMovie, and Mail that have their own trash cans, you need to open the app and erase the deleted files individually.

To permanently delete photos on Mac:

Conclusion:

After the cleansing process is done, your Mac will regain precious space and reward you with improved performance. You can now reboot your Mac to start fresh and enjoy your lightweight Mac. To see how much space is available now, visit the Storage tab in About This Mac.