Cleaning out your Macs storage is a little more tricky than it was about 10 years ago.
Makos has added a lot of different features and background file management stuff that
it can be difficult figuring out where all your space has gone, and especially if you
have 128 gigabyte or even a 256 gigabyte ssd, you may be outta storage pretty quick.
So let me show you a few different ways that you can find and clean out some of the old
stuff you have on your Mac. Funny enough, the fact that Apple's built in storage in
its computers over the last few years is so fast. You may not even notice or realize that
you're running outta space until you see something like this pop up.
And in earlier days, you could easily feel the performance drag on a laptop or a computer
that started having less and less free space, especially if you got down to 10 or 15% free.
But on these guys, you don't even feel it until a bitter end. Let's just start off with
something easy. We can look at the applications folder on the Mac and see if there's any applications
that we don't need or no longer use and we can just get rid of them.
So to do that, go to the applications folder and then just make sure you're in list view.
And from here you can go ahead and click on size and you can sort it by biggest to smallest.
And so you can see right here at the top of the list is this, install Mac OS Ventura.
Now this is not something I need anymore.
I downloaded it to create a VM so I can actually get rid of this. So to get rid of it, you
can select it and hit command, delete, or you can just go ahead and drag it to the trash
like you would any other file. So that was a really obvious one, something that was big
and in there that I just did not need.
But there might be others in here that you just don't use at all. So for me, I never
use iMovie. I'm going to delete that and enter my password and I'll just go down the line.
I don't use GarageBand and you can use shift, click or command. Click to select multiple
things. I do use Keynote sometimes. I do use all of these.
I don't use pages. I don't use descript anymore, so I can just go ahead and delete these and
enter your password. And those are now going to be in the trash where you can right click
and empty trash. Now that right there is actually going to free up quite a bit of disc space,
but you can actually go even further with the applications.
Now I went ahead and put all of those applications back into the applications folder so I can
show you. And what I'm gonna bring up is clean my Mac X and this application actually does
a few different things, but we're gonna look at the uninstall first. So if you open up
this application, clean my Mac X and go to uninstall again, you're going to see a list
of all of your applications.
You can sort by size or name, however you prefer. And to delete software, you're just
going to select the one you want to uninstall, click uninstall and it will remove it for
you. And if you don't know how applications are installed on the Mac, you're probably
thinking, why do I need to do that? If I could just delete it from the applications folder?
Well, deleting it from the applications folder is just one step in the actual removal of
an application from the computer. It doesn't get all of the settings, files, all the little
things that it puts around the system to actually function. It just leaves them. Now you can
go through and manually find all of those files and delete them manually.
Most websites or most companies will have instructions on their website about how to
fully delete all of the other little files that are installed. But clean my back X will
actually help you do that. So let me show you. All right, so I'm gonna go back to my
applications folder and I'm going to look at this application right here.
This is Citrix Workspace. It's something for enterprise it. So I'm going to go ahead and
hit command, delete, and just go ahead and remove it. I'll type in my password and that
file is now in the trash. Now it's in the trash, and I could delete it and it would
be gone except for some other little files. So now in clean, my Mac X, you're not going
to see that application listed here in the applications.
I. List, but you will see over here leftovers. And what this is, these are essentially abandoned
files. Files that no longer have an application associated with them. So Citrix workspace
is in the trash. It's going to be deleted, but there's other things in here that won't
be. So here, for example, is a couple of files for Citrix that are just not going to go anywhere.
They're going to stay on my system. Consuming, yes, a small amount of space, but just. Stuff
accumulating and collecting on your S S D. Also, another one down here. So all of this
stuff is from that Citrix application, but it's just going to stay there on the SSD unless
you get rid of those. So if you've already deleted the application outside of Clean My
macx, you can actually go in here and click these items and click remove, just like you
would the application itself.
However, if you removed the application from here, you would actually remove the application
and all of those extra little files. Clean. My Mac X is not free. I think it's something
like $35 or you can get it in a subscription Mac application service called Set App. But
it is useful and it has a couple of other features as well.
Real quick for just a general overview, you can click on system Junk and scan. And it's
going to look for some common items, some caches, and other things that you just don't
need on your computer. Review details. So right here, it's gonna show you cash files,
and that's gonna be things for like safari and messages and just things that the computer
needs temporarily to show you files or get you things faster.
Pretty much everything listed in the user cash files category can be deleted without
any issues because they'll get reloaded or rebuilt as needed. So I went ahead and cleaned
up and got rid of a few applications and brought my free space up to 22 gigabytes. So a little
bit of breathing room. I have a number of other ways that we can actually clean out
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Now we're gonna look at system settings or system preferences, depending on the version
of Macwas that you have. But I am running Ventura, so I'm going to system settings,
and then I'm going down to general and then storage. And from here you're going to get
a breakdown on the computer of things taking up storage on the Mac, along with a few different
recommendations.
Now, if you're using an operating system before Ventura, you can get the same information
by going to about this Mac. We're gonna go to the storage tab and click manage, and here
you're gonna see most of these same types of information we're gonna show on the Ventura
side, including recommendations, iCloud drive messages, and so on.
So just a little bit different way to get to the same information on a version before
Ventura, and we'll get to the recommendations in just a second. But at the top you see applications,
and of course, we already went through how to remove applications, so we'll skip that.
Then I have some developer tools on here, which I could remove some documents.
You can see that messages has taken up 10 gigabytes. Of storage on this Mac, which is
quite a bit, and if we scroll down, there's music creation parallels vm that is for virtual
machines that I have on here. And then photos is also taking up 10 gigabytes of storage.
And there's ways that we can reduce some of this.
Now, the first thing to do though is going to be looking at the recommendations up at
the top. And you can see here we have optimized storage for Apple tv. This setting just says,
Hey, once you're done watching it, should we just delete it? Because you can always
get it again from the server. Yes is probably the answer.
So we'll just click on optimize On the right, it's gonna tell you exactly what I just said
and click optimize. That means any show or movie that you've already watched using the
TV app will then be removed from your local storage. And the next thing to look at is
empty trash automatically. And if you have a lot of things just sitting in your trash
can that you never actually delete, it's sitting there taking up storage so you can turn on
this setting to automatically remove anything that's been in there for 30 days or longer.
The next thing to look at is empty trash automatically. So if you have a lot of things just sitting
in your trash bin that you actually never delete, then those files are still sitting
there taking up space. So if you turn this on, it will automatically delete anything
that's been in there for more than 30 days.
So if this sounds like something you could use, go ahead and turn it on. Next we have
documents, and you can say, I have nearly 80 gigabytes of files in my user folder. So
I'm going to click the I and see a list of all of the large files. And again, you can
sort by size or name. And see what are the largest files taking up space.
From here, you can go ahead and right click and delete to remove those files. You can
also see a list of all of your downloads files sitting in your downloads folder. You can
see unsupported apps. This is if you migrated from an Intel machine to an apple silicon
machine. You might have applications that can't even run on the computer, and over here
you have a file browser, which kind of lets you drill down into the folders to see those
large files.
But I actually have a free utility that I like better that I'll show you in just a second.
So back in the storage settings, we'll click the I for iCloud Drive and we're going to
click on Open Apple ID settings. We're using 590 megabytes of storage, which is not a lot.
And here you're gonna see an option for optimized Mac storage.
And just like with optimizing for the TV app, This will essentially get rid of anything
on the Mac that you're not using. It keeps it on iCloud so you can still access them
the same way, but it doesn't keep a local copy on the computer until you need it. And
then it opens just like any other native file.
Now, back in settings, general storage, we can look at messages taking up over 10 gigabytes
of space, and you can see the large attachments sitting inside of messages. Now you can actually
just select one or many of these. Old videos or photos or files that you've sent through
iMessage and just go ahead and delete them.
But another option is actually to reduce the amount of messages that you keep. And to do
that you're gonna go to messages and settings, and inside here you'll see an option for keep
messages. For me, it's set to forever and it's probably set. Two forever for most of
you by default as well. But you could actually change this to one year or 30 days, and that
means that after one year or 30 days, messages will just be deleted from your account so
you don't have to see them anymore and they don't take up any space.
Of course, that could be a big problem if you use it for keeping a lot of photos and
videos from friends and family, but that is an option and it could reduce a significant
amount of space. And that's a similar story with photos as well, using 9.63 gigabytes.
So if we open up photos and go to settings, you'll see an option here.
Just like with the iCloud storage and the Apple TV storage, you can click on optimized
Mac storage and it will keep small copies of a lot of your photos on the computer. But
if you need the other ones, it will pull 'em on demand from iCloud. And this is huge because
if you had all of the originals downloaded to your Mac, you might be using 40, 60, 80
gigabytes or whatever.
So if you click this optimized Mac storage setting, it's going to slowly remove large
copies of the files from your computer. Again, keep those on iCloud so you can still access
them, but free up the local space on this device. And the last thing I wanna show you
is this omni disk sweeper tool, which I mentioned before.
This is a free utility that lets you see all of your files and find the biggest ones as
well. So you can just go ahead and down that. It's a free utility and when you open it up,
you're going to see a list of your files. You can go ahead and click on your system
drive, double click it, and it's going to start calculating all of the files on the
disk for you.
So we'll give it just a moment. And there we go. It's calculated about 181 gigabytes
of storage used on this computer right now. With my user folder being the largest at 138
gigabytes, 10 gigs for the system, eight gigs for the library, and so on. So let's just
go ahead and click on users. Of course, it's going to be my profile.
So we can see the temp folder is the biggest, and inside there is a final cut folder. And
in here is a very old project file, so I can actually just go ahead and click trash on
that and delete it. So this is a similar tool to what we saw before in system preferences.
It just gives you a different kind of layout.
And I actually like this layout because it gets you into folders that the system tool.
Doesn't. For example, if I click on library right here, the system tool's not gonna show
you this. And you can see the biggest offender of space is messages, and we've already talked
about how we can clear up some of that space.
Next we can look at application support and we can see that descript is taking up three
gigabytes of space. Now I'm not really using Descript anymore, so I should probably use
Clean my Mac X to remove it and all of its other little files. Other than that, I'm not
really seeing anything that stands out that I should probably get rid of.
Maybe some of these things in movies, because these are probably leftover stuff from Final
Cut Pro videos that I was working on. But other than that, I think it looks pretty good.
Now, if you go through all of this and you just have not been able to clean out enough
space, or you still need to store more files on your computer, then your only option left
is probably going to be.
Something like this. This is an external storage drive. This is an O WC Envoy Pro fx. It's
a Thunderbolt three drive. I do recommend this drive. This is the best drive when I
did a comparison a while back comparing four different Thunderbolt drives, so I highly
recommend this. It's really fast. It's thunderbolt, so you get about 2,500 megabytes.
Read and write per second, which is crazy fast. So what do you guys think? Are there
better applications out there that can help you find and remove old crap from your Mac
that you no longer need? Let me know when the comment's below. Also, if you like Thunderbolt,
I recently did a video comparing three of the best Thunderbolt four docs you can get.
You can check out that video right over here. Hit the thumbs up button if you liked it.
Hit subscribe if you want, and I'll see you next time.