There comes a time in every computer's life when it is full of files and programs, slowing it down so much that its owner searches for an article such as this in order to cure it of these ailments (before it gets thrown out the window!).
It also does a good job of showing how much space you’re saving with each scan of your drive and it offers a “Collector” feature that which stores items you mark for deletion before doing a full delete.Last Updated : 1st December 2021 | Author: Wide Angle Software Dev Team Though it’s functionally much the same as Disk Inventory, DaisyDisk does offer a different way of looking at files that some people might prefer. If you don’t like the Disk Inventory interface, there is a paid tool with a more modern design called DaisyDisk. It does show system files and will let you delete them, so you’ll want to stick mainly to your home directory unless you know what you’re doing. There is one important thing to keep in mind when using Disk Inventory X, though. There’s also a tree view on the sidebar that lets you see how much space every folder takes up, and you can drill down to find the files you might want to delete. You can right-click each file to move it to the Trash or view more info about it. Click any square to view the associated file name. You can see which sections are taking up the most space by which squares in the visual display are the largest.
Use a Third-Party Tool For Even Better Controlĭisk Inventory X is an excellent free tool for visualizing disk space.
You can use it to configure iCloud storage and set your Mac to empty the Trash automatically, for example.
The Storage Management app has some other useful tools, as well. It’s hard to select specific files for deletion because you’re not given a proper context for where the files are stored or how important they might be.Ī much better interface is the Storage Management app built into macOS, which displays all files sorted by size, and shows the date you accessed them last:.The Finder only shows single files over a certain size, not folders full of smaller files, such as Downloads or program installs.However, there are two drawbacks to this method: You can then choose which ones you want to delete.
Type in the minimum file size you want to search for (over 100MB or so will do the trick) and you’ll see a list of all files over that size. You can then use the drop-down menus to select the “File Size” and “Greater Than” options. 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. Freeing up disk space on a full hard drive can be difficult, especially when it’s full of small files.