![]() ![]() It’s great for trawling through your drive to find see what’s consuming all that space. Large Files focuses on files over 50 MB in size, Downloads shows you the contents of your Downloads folder (much of which you probably don’t need to keep), and File Browser gives you a column view that’s sorted by file size and shows sizes next to each item. In Documents, you’ll see three buttons: Large Files, Downloads, and File Browser. Plus, you can redownload anything tagged as coming from the App Store, so you can toss those apps if you want. Similarly, click the Last Accessed column header to see which apps you haven’t launched in years. You can probably delete any apps tagged as duplicates or older versions. But try clicking the column header for Kind and scrolling down. The Applications category shown above lists your apps and is sorted by size by default. It’s worth keeping the latest backup of devices you still use, but many people have older backups and unnecessary updates kicking around. iOS Files, for instance, shows any device backups and software updates that are stored on your Mac’s drive. More interesting are the Applications, Documents, and iOS Files categories, all of which may contain gigabytes of unnecessary data. For those apps, you must delete unnecessary data from within the app itself. They will vary a bit between Macs, depending on what apps you use, but they correspond to the colored bars you saw in the About This Mac window’s Storage view.įor app-specific categories, like GarageBand, Mail, and Photos, Storage Management merely tells you how much space the app’s data occupies and provides a button for opening the app. (You can also open System Information manually and choose Window > Storage Management.) In the sidebar at the left, ignore Recommendations and look at the rest of the categories. When you click Manage, System Information launches, and the Storage Management window appears. You can’t do much here, but the view gives you a quick overview of your drive usage. The white space at the end of the bar is what’s still available. ![]() Hover over each colored bar to see how much space is taken up by a particular type of data. Storage Management is hidden inside the System Information app and is most easily accessed by choosing > About This Mac, clicking the Storage button, and then clicking Manage…but wait! Before you click Manage, look at the About This Mac window’s Storage view. Numerous utilities exist to help you find and delete unnecessary files, like GrandPerspective, OmniDiskSweeper, and WhatSize, but in macOS 10.12 Sierra, Apple provides a built-in tool to clean house: the Storage Management window. A MacBook Air might have only 128 GB of drive space, and that goes quickly. Between photos, videos, music, and downloads, it’s easy to fill up your Mac’s drive, particularly if it has fast but small flash storage. ![]()
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