1. Freeing Up Disk Space On Macbook Air
2. How To Free Disk Space On Mac
3. Freeing Up Disk Space On My Macbook Air
4. How To Free Up Disk Storage On Mac
5. How To Clear Space On Macbook
6. Freeing Up Disk Space On Macbook

/Mac Cleaner /How to Free up Space on Mac -- Complete Guide in 2021

• Free up storage space on your Mac Save space by storing your content in iCloud or using built-in tools to find and remove large or unneeded files. The Optimized Storage features of your Mac help you save storage space by storing your content in iCloud and making it available on demand.
• To free up disk space, it’s helpful to know exactly what is using disk space on your Mac. 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. You can then delete these space hogs to free up space.
• Jun 19, 2019 The bigger the files you can delete, the more space you can free up—so let's go hunting. Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the menu bar and choose About This Mac. If that overview.

Our Mac is one of the most useful devices that we tend to use in our everyday life, especially for people who run a business, working person, or a student. However, as time goes by, your Mac will be filled with the files and other things that you no longer need. These files can actually make your Mac run slow and can eat up your space.

So, first, ensure that the system is, in fact, running out of free space. There are two methods to check available space on a hard drive: 1. Access the Apple menu and select About this Mac. Choose the Storage tab. More detailed information can be found within the Disk Utility feature, which is located in the Applications folder under.

In this article, we are going to show you how to free up space on Mac in both the easy way and the manual way. The fact that MacBook Air only comes with 128 gigabytes of storage doesn't make it any easier for you to conserve more space. It fills up even faster. If you have a MacBook Air, here are the same ways on how to free up space on Macbook Air.

Article GuidePart 1. How to Check Storage on Mac?Part 2. How Do I Free Up Disk Space on My Mac?Part 3. How to Free up Space on Mac Using Terminal?

Part 1. How to Check Storage on Mac?

So, how to know what files are taking up storage space on your Mac? Follow these steps:

1. Click the Apple menu then choose “About This Mac'.
2. Click the Storage then you will view different file types are displayed in different colors.

This shows you the size of each folder on your Mac so you can see how much space everything takes. At this point, you will know what files are eating up your storage and manage them.

Cleaning your Mac will definitely take a lot of your time especially if there are a lot of files or junks that are stored in it that you do not actually use and need. However, there is definitely a way for you to clean it up the easiest and in the fastest way possible. This is by using a Mac Cleaner that has powerful functions. And with that, we have the best cleaner that you can use. This is the iMyMac PowerMyMac.

It has the ability to get rid of all the junk files that you have stored on your Mac. It can also remove all the email attachments, iTunes backup, and the multi-languages on your Mac. It also has the ability to find and then completely remove your Large and Old Files and all of your duplicate files.

By doing all this, the PowerMyMac will be able to speed up your Mac and as well as to free up space. This way, you will still have enough space to install other applications that you need and files that are more important.

Part 2. How Do I Free Up Disk Space on My Mac?

Here, we are going to show you some ways on how to free up space on Mac so that you will be able to save more apps and files that you need. You can do that manually or let PowerMyMac do the favor for you.

1. Check Out Your Disk To See What is Taking Up Space and Locate Files

If you would want to know how to free up space on Mac, then it is a good way for you to see which is actually taking up your disk space. This way, you will be able to know what to delete from your Mac and what not.

You can use a certain tool that will help you in finding all the things that are taking up space on your Mac the most. Then that is the time that you can delete all of the things that you no longer need that is taking up a huge space on your Mac.

2. Locate and Remove Duplicate Files

One of the most common things that we tend to have on our Mac is having duplicate files that we are not aware of. This usually happens if you are using your Mac for a very long time. Here are the steps to remove duplicate files:

1. Launch Finder then click the File option.
2. Choose the 'New Smart Folder' then click the '+' button.
3. Search for different files types like photos, songs, or documents.
4. Check if the file is duplicate then move to the Trash.

You can also use PowerMyMac's Duplicate Finder to remove these duplicate files on your Mac easily.

1. Launch PowerMyMac then choose the Duplicate Finder.
2. Let PowerMyMac Scan all the files on your Mac and it will show the duplicates in different file types.
3. Select the duplicate files you want to remove then press the Clean button.

3. Uninstall App That You No Longer Use

There are instances that you have installed Applications on your Mac that you do not really need and it is actually taking up a lot of space on your Mac. With this, you should go ahead and uninstall it if you do not need it. For you to remove these applications that you no longer need, here is what you need to do on how to free up space on Mac:

1. Go ahead and launch Finder on your Mac.
2. And then choose Applications located at your sidebar.
3. After that, go ahead and drag the application that you no longer need and drop them in your trash bin icon on your Mac’s dock.

Now if you want to know which of the applications that you have installed on your Mac that you do not likely use, all you have to do is to do the following. This way, you will have an idea on which of your Apps you do not really need.

1. Go ahead and launch Finder on your Mac.
2. And then go ahead and click on Applications.
3. After that, go ahead and choose “Show Items on the List” on the toolbar.
4. Then, goa head and click on the Size heading for you to be able to sort out your Applications by size.

If you want to uninstall apps completely with all the related files, PowerMyMac should help you a lot:

1. Launch PowerMyMac then choose the Uninstaller module.
2. Let PowerMyMac Scan all the apps on your Mac and it will list them as well as the related files.
3. Select the apps you no longer need to delete then press the Clean button.

4. Get Rid of Large and Old Files

Large and old files are useless and taking lots of space on your Mac, just follow the steps below to get rid of them:

1. Launch Finder and locate the search field.
2. Choose “This Mac”
   
3. Make the 'File Size' settings to 'is greater than' ## MB.
4. Then you can remove files that are large as you want.

PowerMyMac's Large & Old File can also help you to remove those big files to get more space back.

5. Clean Up Your iTunes Backup of Your iPhone/iPad on your Mac

Backing up your data is one of the best ways to keep them safe. This way, you will have a way for you to get them back if ever you have lost your iPhone device or if you have damaged it.

However, as you make more backups of your data on your Mac, it is actually one cause of eating space on your Mac. This is because every time you back up your data, these backup files will actually pile up on your Mac over the time.

Now, the best way on how to free up space on Mac is to remove all those backup files that you no longer need:

1. Operate 'Finder > Go > Go to Folder'
2. Copy and paste “~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/”
3. Move to Trash.

Delete a specific backup:

1. After connecting your device to Mac, go to Finder.
2. Select your device under the Locations.
3. Click Manage Backups then right-click the name of the backup and choose the “Show in Finder”.
4. Press the Delete button to remove that backup.

If you think these steps on how to free up space on Mac are complicated, PowerMyMac would be the best helper to remove the iOS backups for you.

6. Remove All of Your Temporary Files

The Mac that you are using also contains some temporary files that you actually do not need. These temporary files also cause Mac system taking up too much space. Removing the temporary files that you have on your Mac will not make it run faster but it will definitely free up your space.

There are several temporary files that you have on your Mac. And you will be able to see them once that you access your Finder and Go and then Go to the folder of the menu and use ~/Library/Caches. This command will be able to lead you to the cache folder of your Mac. And you will be surprised to see a lot of folders in that section.

Freeing Up Disk Space On Macbook Air

7. Remove The Language Files on Your Mac

All the applications that you have on your Mac actually come up with language files that they actually support. This way, you will be able to switch the system language on your Mac and then you will be able to use that application on the language that you have selected.

However, you do not need most of these language files your applications have. Well, you may need some if you are able to speak and understand that language, but if not, they might as well remove them. However, this is may be a problem to locate these language files. Thus, you need PowerMyMac to find out these files for you to remove.

Besides language files, PowerMyMac can locate and remove other files like caches, logs, iOS backups, system junks, and even empty Trash. All these can be done via its “Master Scan” module:

1. Click on the “Scan” button, then the PowerMyMac will start scanning all the junk files on your Mac.
2. Wait until the program is done with the scanning process. PowerMyMac will then show you all the junk files that it has found on your Mac. These junk files will be listed by category.
3. From the list of categories shown on your screens such as Application Cache, Photo Cache, Email Cache, System Cache, and more, go ahead choose a category that you want to clean up.
4. Choose the items that you would want to remove. Once that you are satisfied with the items that you have selected, go ahead and click on the “Clean” button.

You see, isn't it the easiest way on how to free up space on Mac startup disk with PowerMyMac?

8. Delete Downloads Folder

There’s usually a default folder where all downloads such as zip files, TV shows, videos, and photos are stored. If you no longer need these downloads, then it's time to delete some files in your Downloads folder:

1. Access to the Downloads folder via Dock or Finder.
2. Select the files you want to delete. Then right-click on them to choose to Move to Trash.
3. Empty Trash then the files will permanently be deleted.

9. Empty Your Trash Bin

Most people would think that once that you have put a certain file in the trash bin, then that means that the file was actually deleted. Well, that is wrong. The truth is, once that you have put a file on the trash bin, it just sits there and still eats up space on your Mac.

How to free up memory on Mac completely? To achieve this, you can go ahead and simply empty your trash bin. All you have to do is to press on the Ctrl button + right click on the trash bin icon located at the bottom of your screen. Then after that, go ahead and choose Empty Trash option. Then all the files that it contains will be completely deleted from your Mac and that you can no longer recover them.

Part 3. How to Free up Space on Mac Using Terminal?

If you are familiar with the Terminal command line, here are some quick tips to free up space with Terminal:

• Command to Remove Duplicates: find . -size 20 ! -type d -exec cksum {} ; | sort | tee /tmp/f.tmp | cut -f 1,2 -d ' ' | uniq -d | grep -hif – /tmp/f.tmp > duplicates.txt
• Remove System Logs: sudo rm -rf /private/var/log/*
• Delete Cache Files: rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/*
• Remove Speech Voices: sudo rm -rf Voices/*

Now you have learned how to free up space on Mac with auto and manual ways. There are really several other ways that you can clean up your Mac and that you will be able to free up some of your space. You can either do this process by going all through this one by one.

Well, if you want to save time and do this in the fastest, easiest and yet very efficient way, then the PowerMyMac is the tool that you should use. Just have its free trial to get more space on your Mac now!

ExcellentThanks for your rating.

Rating: 4.8 / 5 (based on 95 ratings)

People Also Read:

PowerMyMac

A powerful all-in-one App for Mac

Clean up and speed up your Mac with ease

How To Free Disk Space On Mac

Summary :

From this MiniTool article, you can know what the startup disk on your Mac is, what is taking up space on the Mac startup disk, the influence of startup disk full, and how to clear the startup disk space when the startup disk is full or your disk is almost full on your Mac.

What Is Startup Disk on Mac?

Like a Windows startup disk, the startup disk on your Mac is the disk that saved the operating system on your Mac. It is an important disk on your computer. If the operating system on the disk is corrupted or even the startup disk is damaged, your Mac computer will not boot normally.

What Is Taking Up Space on Your Mac Startup Disk?

As you know, a Mac computer’s disk is usually not as large as a Windows computer’s disk. As of 2020, Apple has improved the disk capacity and the maximum disk size can reach up to 8TB. But they are the Pro series, which are not widely used.

Most of the time, you should not worry about the disk space issue because macOS always do work online. This will not take up much disk space. However, what’s going on if you see a pop-up alert saying Your startup disk is almost full?

At this time, you should know what is taking up space on the startup disk of your Mac and then take some measures to clear the startup disk.

The hidden website cache takes much space on the startup disk. For example, statistics show that Google Chrome can create numerous cache folders after you visit some web sites. The size of the cache for one site can even reach up to 9 GB. This is quite surprising, but it is true.

As time goes on, the free space on the startup disk becomes less and less. One day, you may receive the startup disk full alert.

Besides, when a warning of Your disk is almost full pops up, it also means that there is not enough space on your Mac. It is equal to startup disk full. Likewise, you need to remove some files to free up disk space on your Mac computer.

What Does It Mean When Your Startup Disk Is Full?

When does it mean when you receive your startup disk is almost full alert?

It has two main influences:

1. You will soon run out of space on the startup disk.

Your startup disk is almost full is an early warning for you. It reminds you of cleaning up the startup disk. However, if you continue to use your Mac without cleaning up disk space, more and more data will be saved to the startup disk. One day, your Mac will run out of space and you will not use the machine as normal.

2. Your Mac computer will run slowly.

Some of you may think that your Mac computer will not be affected when there is space in the startup disk no matter it is much or less. It is wrong.

A Mac computer can convert the available free space on the startup disk into virtual memory that you use for day-to-day operations. In theory, there should be at least 10% of free disk space for your Mac to operate. If not, your Mac computer will run slowly and even face big trouble like Mac frozen.

When the machine detects that the available space on the startup disk is insufficient, it will give you a warning. This aims to remind you it’s time to clear the startup disk on your Mac.

What should you do when your startup disk is full on your Mac? In the following part, we will show you some solutions.

How to Clear the startup Disk?

If you want to clear your Mac startup disk, you need to delete the unnecessary files on it. Before doing this, you can check the storage space on your Mac.

Freeing Up Disk Space On My Macbook Air

How to Check the Storage Space on Your Mac?

1. Click the Apple menu from the top-left corner of the screen.
2. Click About This Mac from the drop-down list.
3. Switch to the Storage section.

After these three steps, you can see the storage information of your Mac disk, including the files’ types, the free space on the drive, and more.

If your Mac Startup disk is full, you can do these things to free up disk space:

How to Clean the Startup Disk on Your Mac?

1. Remove the App Cache from your Mac.
2. Empty Trash.
3. Delete the unnecessary Time Machine backup snapshots.
4. Delete browser cache.
5. Remove language packs.
6. Use Startup Disk Full Fixer.

Tip 1: Remove the App Cache from Your Mac

The app cache files are necessary when you want to speed up processes. Once you complete the process, the cache files become useless. But these cache files will stay on the startup disk for a long time unless you manually delete them. When they are useless, they are junk files. To clean up your Mac startup disk, you need to remove them from the machine.

1. Go to Finder > Go > Go to Folder.
2. Type ~/Library/Caches.
3. Go into each folder and then delete the files in it. You can also choose to only delete the files that take up the most space.
4. You can repeat the above three steps for /Library/Caches to remove the App cache.

Tip 2: Empty Trash

When you delete files from your Mac, they will be moved to Trash. The files on Trash also occupy space on your Mac startup disk. As long as you are sure that you don’t need to use these files anymore, you can empty Trash to free up disk space.

To do this job, you just need to open Trash and then click the Empty button on the top-right side to remove files from your Mac. Since then, there will be more available disk space on your Mac.

Tip 3: Delete the Unnecessary Time Machine Backup Snapshots

Most people would like to use Time Machine to back up their Mac files to an external hard drive. You may think that the backup files are save to the external hard drive. But that’s not all. During the Mac data process, the local snapshots also automatically start once every 24 hours. That’s right. The snapshots are saved to your Mac, taking up disk space.

You can delete the unnecessary Time Machine backup snapshots to release space on the startup disk.

1. Open Finder.
2. Go to Go > Utilities.
3. Double-click Terminal to open it.
4. Type sudo tmutil disablelocal into Terminal, and press Enter.

Do you know how to delete Time Machine backups on your Mac computer? In this post, we will show you different cases and different methods.

Tip 4: Delete Browser Cache

Every time you visit a new web site using your web browser, some cache files will be created and saved to your Mac disk. This can help you to quickly a previous page again. But these files can also use up your disk space. So, you can delete these browser cache files to release more space on your Mac:

1. Open your web browser.
2. Click the History tab and then select Clear browsing data.
3. Select the cache files you want to delete like Cookies, site data, Cached images and files.
4. Choose how far back you want to delete
5. Click the Clear browsing data button to delete the selected cache files.

Tip 5: Remove Language Packs

Most apps contain language packs (which are also known as localization files). These packs allow you to switch between languages when using the app. They are useful, but you need to admit that you only need one or two languages. The rest language packs just waste your disk space. You can choose to delete them:

1. Open Applications.
2. Right-click an app and then select Show Package Contents.
3. Click Contents.
4. Click Resources.
5. Delete the language packs you don’t need to use. The pack files are ending in .Iproj.
6. Repeat these steps for all other apps on your Mac.

Tip 6: Use Startup Disk Full Fixer

Startup Disk Full Fixer is the best free app for you to perform a quick Mac disk cleanup. It can help you to get more free storage space in less than a minute. You can go to the Mac App Store to free download this application. Then, you can open it and use it to clean up your startup disk to get rid of the low disk space warning. It is a safe program. You can feel free to use it.

How to Free up Disk Space on Your Mac?

Your disk is almost full is another alert that prompts you to clear disk space on your Mac computer. We have published a related article to free up disk space on Mac: How to Clear Disk Space on Mac and Recover Mac Data?

If you have some other good ideas to release disk space on Mac, you can share them with us in the comment. We will appreciate that.

If You Delete Some Important Files on Your Mac by Mistake

As you can see, it is a file deletion process when you clear the startup disk on your Mac. During the process, you may delete some of your important files by mistake. Once these files are permanently deleted from your Mac computer, you will be unable to restore them from Trash. If you want to retrieve them, you can try the free Mac data recovery software: Stellar Data Recovery for Mac.

This software has a trial edition. You can use it to scan the Mac disk you want to recover data from and then check whether it can find the files you want to rescue. If yes, you can upgrade it to a full edition and then use it to recover all your needed files to a suitable location. You can go to the MiniTool download center to get this trial edition.

1. Open this software.

2. Select the data types you want to restore. If you want to recover all, you can turn on the button for Recover Everything.

3. Click the Next button to continue.

4. This software will list all the drives it can detect. Then, you need to select the drive you want to recover from. If you want to perform a deep scan, you need to switch the button for Deep Scan to ON.

5. Click the Scan button to start the scanning process.

How To Free Up Disk Storage On Mac

6. When the scanning process ends, you can see the scan results. By default, these files are list by Classic List. There are two other lists including File List and Deleted List. If you only need to recover the deleted files, you can switch to Deleted List and then find your needed items.

7. This software allows you to preview files. You can just double-click on one file to preview it and confirm whether it is your needed file.

8. If you are sure this software finds your needed files, you can go to MiniTool official site to get a license of an advanced edition to upgrade this software. After that, you can select files and then save them to a suitable folder. Here, you need to know that the destination folder should not be the original one. Otherwise, the deleted files could be overwritten and become unrecoverable.

How To Clear Space On Macbook

Bottom Line

When your startup disk is full or you see the alert of your disk is almost full on your Mac, you can just try the methods mentioned in this article to free up disk space and remove the warning. If you mistakenly delete important files, you can use Stellar Data Recovery for Mac to get them back.

Should you have any related issues, you can let us know in the comment. You can also contact us via [email protected].

Startup Disk Full FAQ

Freeing Up Disk Space On Macbook