5 Tips And Tricks To Free Up Disk Space And Hidden Storage On Your Mac

As our devices become more capable and powerful, our Macs can charge faster than we expect. Follow five tips and tricks to free up Mac storage and hidden space with advanced native and third-party options.

If you want to free up Mac storage faster, there's always the option of downloading your data to an external drive, iCloud Drive, or other cloud services. But it is often convenient to store your data on Mac.

But one problem when you're trying to optimize your local storage is that hidden files and folders take up space, making it difficult to figure out what's going on. Below are some options for quickly freeing up Mac storage, as well as some ways to find out which large files and more are hiding on your drive.

macOS built-in options

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• Modern versions of macOS don't include the old All Files option in Finder, but there is a recent option that you can use as a good starting point.
• After choosing the last one , you can sort your files and folders by size (six square icon) and start deleting unnecessary data .
• Of course, you can manually check other areas such as documentation, downloads, etc.

This is about Mac.

There's also a Storage feature to get a snapshot of your storage usage on this Mac, but it also offers recommendations for freeing up space and more.

• Open System Settings (System Preferences in previous versions of macOS)
• Now select General > Storage
• Above is a colored bar that shows the general categories that take up disk space
• You will then see a list of suggestions for freeing up space.
  • Optimize storage, use iCloud, automatically empty trash, reduce clutter, and more.
• After doing one of these options, you will see list of apps and usage rate > Click "i" on the right side to see more details.
• In particular, Apple does not allow you to delete system data and other categories here (see options for doing this below).
• You can click on all volumes in the upper right corner to view other drivers, including external vehicles.

Dig deeper to free up storage on your Mac

Chamomile disk

When I use Finder and find it on this Mac, my favorite method is to clean Daisy Disk with Visual Drive Analyzer (free trial/$9.99). It offers an interactive interface that works beautifully, and you can preview and delete files within the app. You can check external vehicles.

DaisyDisk provides an in-depth view of your storage and reveals hidden and temporary files so you know what's eating up your disk space. And the colorful interface sorts very large files and folders quickly and easily.

The program even offers free space and a free + clearable account. I use DaisyDisk three or four times a year, so the $9.99 lifetime license seems like a steal for convenience and time savings.

In my example above, I used 30.2 GB of hidden space. It is a cache of Time Machine backups (which should be fixed soon).

Clean my mac and feel

Other useful options to find junk files, uninstall applications, improve performance, etc. to save time are Clean My Mac X and Sensei. They don't give you a detailed disk analyzer like Daisy Disk Interface, but they do offer a lot of useful tools, including storage management.

Both Sensei and Clean My Mac X are free downloads, while Sensei costs $29 per year or $59 for life. Clean My Mac X costs $39.99 per year or $89.99 for lifetime.

Thanks for checking out our guide to freeing up Mac storage.

Read more 9to5Mac tutorials.

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