How To Find Out Whats Taking Up Space On Mac

1. How To Find Out What's Taking Up Space On Mac
2. How To Find Out What S Taking Up Space On Mac

Delete Cache Files on Mac. Best golf game for mac 2019. In typical situations, you do not need to worry much about cache.

• If you find your Mac is beginning to run low on hard drive space, Finder is the built-in default file manager that allows you to see which files are taking up the most space.
• In your Finder window, press ⌘+J for View Options (also in View menu). Check the box to 'Calculate all sizes' and wait while your folder size data populates.
• Mac OS X uses base 10 since Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to report file and volume sizes, thus 30,000,000,000 bytes get reported as 30 GB. As for finding out what takes up the storage space, take a.

When you Mac's hard drive is almost full, you can investigate and figure out what is using the space by simply using the Finder. There is no need to buy a third-party app to manage your hard drive. You start at the top and view all of your folders, digging down to see what is using the most space. Then you'll need to make some decisions about what to remove from yoru drive, being care to only remove files you don't need.

Check out How To Figure Out What Is Taking Up Space On Your Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. I'm going to show you how to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive without having to buy any third party apps.MacMost is brought to you thanks to a community of supporters. Join us and get exclusive content at MacMost.com/patreon.So on forums all over the internet I see Mac users asking how they can figure out what's taking up space on their hard drive and people answering with third party apps that you have to buy and install to figure it out. You don't need any of that. It's pretty easy to figure out what's taking up space on your hard drive by just using the Finder.Let's start off by making sure we're in the Finder. Once we're there let's create a new Finder window. Now basically we're playing detective. We want to start at the top and start looking down at all the folders on our drive. We're going to use Go and Computer. This takes you to the top level. You can see I've got a couple of external drives but the drive I'm interested in is my main internal drive called Macintosh HD. I'll go into that and I'll see the main folders there. You're always going to see Applications, Library, System, and Users. Now from this point we want to pay attention to what's taking up space.So we're going to switch to List View. I'm going to click this button here and to go to List View. Now I've got columns here. I can adjust the columns to move them around. I want to see the Size column. That's the one I'm mostly interested in. So make sure that's within view. You're going to see these little dashes here. It's not going to calculate the size of folders. That's pretty hard to do because It has got to look at every file in that folder, figure out the file size, and add them all up. Folders like Applications and System have tons of files in them. But you can force it to give you a size here by going to View, Show View Options, note this is Command J.Here there is an option called Calculate All Sizes. We're going to check that. Then we're going to wait for it to replace these dashes with actual numbers. Give it a few minutes to do that. For me it took a few minutes for the Applications' folder size to appear and a few minutes after that for the Users' folder to appear. So Applications, of course, is where all your apps are stored and it's always going to be pretty big. Your Library folder and your System folder together make up the system. Most of the big files you're going to find in the Library folder. The System folder itself should never get too big. That's just the size of the System. Users is where all of your documents and data files are kept. If you have multiple users on that Mac they are all going to be in there.So let's start by investigating the Applications folder. We don't need to double click it and open it up to see what's in there because in List View we can click on the Reveal triangle here to the left and it will open up and we can see all of the different files in there. Now if we click on Size it's going to sort everything by size. See the Users folder jumps to the top. The Applications folder is next and things inside the Applications folder are going to be sorted. So you can see I've got Xcode beta in there taking up a lot of space. Xcode is taking up a lot of space and on down. So I can ignore the small apps further down and pay attention to the big ones. Maybe there's an app in here that you can uninstall that's taking up a lot of space.We can close that and then we can look at the Library folder. Likewise in the Library folder you're going to probably find Application Support at the top. You can open that up as well and see what's taking up a lot of space in there. So here I've got Audio apps, Logic and GarageBand taking up a lot of space. I can look inside them and see some of the things in there. You can go further on down. So you can see Applications that you may be able to uninstall to get back space in your Library folder. Also in the Audio file I'll find more files supporting GarageBand specifically taking up a lot of space.So it's just a matter of looking through all of the things inside your Library folder and seeing what's taking up a lot fo space. If you don't recognize what it is maybe do a search for it to find out what this folder is for. Then you can make a decision from there whether or not you need it.Now your Users folder may be the largest user of space as it is for me. If I open it up I can see all the users on this machine. So that's my main user account. This is the user account I use to make videos and I have a few other demo accounts. This account here, the one I'm using, is taking up a decent amount of space. I can look inside that to figure out what's using a lot there. I can see under Movies I've got quite a bit. I've got a FinalCut bundle in there. So a Final Cut library that's taking up most of it. Then I can look in Pictures and see a decent amount of space being used for my photos library and that's how much is being used for music, etc. You may find something like a ton of stuff in your Downloads folder which solves the mystery. Now you just need to empty your Downloads folder of things you no longer need.Now notice something is missing here. 70 GB for this user folder. Then I've got this one that's less than 20 GB and another that's 3 and then everything is less than a GB. How can that add up to 70. It turns out that there's a hidden folder inside the User folder that's probably using a lot of space. That's the Library folder. Yes, we have this Library folder here. That's at the System level. That's the System Library folder. Inside of a User folder we've got another Library folder in each user's account. So in this case, in the MacMost account folder here, I'll double click it to go in it, you won't see that library folder. You can get to it by using Go holding the Option key down and go into library. But I don't actually want to see it here in the list. So I'm going to use that Command J again to bring up this list here. In addition to Calculate All Sizes I now have Show Library Folder. I'm going to use that and now Library appears. Let me adjust these columns here. I can see, sure enough, that accounts for all of the extra space. I can go through this Library folder just like I went through the System Library folder. Open it up and see what's inside. Let me Sort by Size here. I can see Application Support is the majority of it. I can open up Application Support I can see MobileSync is using a lot. Now MobileSync actually contains my backups for my iPhones. If you want to get rid of these iOS backups you go, in Mojave, go to iTunes, iTunes Preferences, then you click on Devices. Here are those backups, right there. So you can Delete them. Of course you may not want to delete them because they're useful as backups.Figuring out what's taking up space is only the first step. Now you've got to do something to clear out space. If there are documents in your User folder that you no longer need you may want to buy an external hard drive, archive those files to that drive, and get rid of them off your regular drive to clear space. If they're applications you want to uninstall them. Make sure you uninstall them properly which means using the official uninstaller provided by the developer or instructions on their site. If you've got the app in the App Mac Store use Launchpad to remove the app. If they are items say in the System or User Library folder you want to be careful. Deleting things from there can cause trouble. Can make apps stop working or even the system itself stop working. So you want to do some research. Look up that item. Do a search online to figure out what that folder is for and really know what you're doing before you remove items from your Library folder. A lot of times you actually go into an app to remove things. For instance FinalCut Pro has the ability to cleanup its own files inside of FinalCut. So you want to do that there and not mess around with the files directly. Cleaning out cache files is usually counterproductive as they usually speed up using your Mac. For instance the Browser cache files make it faster to browse the internet. Clearing those out may temporarily give you space back but then it's just going to fill up again and until it does that means you're going to be redownloading those files slowing down your internet browsing.Sometimes there's not much you can do. The apps that you've got and the documents you're storing on your hard drive are just taking up a lot of space. You may need to make some tough calls. Uninstall some applications you're not using as often, use iCloud Drive set to Optimize so that maybe some of your older files aren't going to take up space, and the next time you buy a new Mac make sure you get a larger hard drive.

When you check the storage on your Mac, you might see a significant percentage of space occupied by something called ‘Other. Catalina 2009 mac pro. Best mac antivirus and malware protection. ' macOS does not go into much detail. You may wonder what is Other storage on Mac, why it eats up so much space, and how can I delete it? Let me help by telling you more about this to free space on your Mac.

How to Check Storage on Mac

1. Click on the Apple logo from the top-left and choose About This Mac.
2. Click on Storage. Wait for a few seconds.
3. Take the mouse pointer to colored sections. You will see how much space is occupied by different categories like Apps, Photos, System, Trash, Other, etc.

What is Other on Mac Storage?

Just like the ‘Other' on iPhone and iPad, it is home to several files, cached data, and more. This section houses a mix of junk and important files.

In the simplest of terms, the 'Other' category is a combination of files that are not recognized as one of the other file types. Here are some examples:-

• • Common documents and file types, including PDF, doc, PSD, etc.
  • Any type of archives and disk images, including zips, dmg, iso, tar, etc.
  • Files in the system folders of macOS, including temporary files, swap, voices, etc.
  • Application Support files, iCloud files, Screensavers, etc.
  • Cache items, including browser cache and locally stored message media files.
  • Fonts, app accessories, application plugins, and app extensions.
  • Various file and file types not recognized by Spotlight, for example, a virtual machine hard drive, Windows Boot Camp partitions, etc.

How to Delete Other on Mac Storage

Delete Cache Files on Mac

In typical situations, you do not need to worry much about cache. macOS handles them smartly. But if you are too low on storage or believe in having the cache of unused/uninstalled apps, here is how to delete them.

Note: Fuel for keynote themes 2 0 download free. Caches are there to make your Mac experience better and faster. Make sure you remove only the unnecessary ones.

1. From Finder, click on Go.
2. Press the option key. You will see a new option for the Library. Click on it.
3. Click on Caches.
4. Right-click on unnecessary app/service folders and choose Move to Trash.
5. Right-click on the Trash icon and choose Empty Trash.

Note + Tip: With regular use, macOS will recreate these caches. If you do not understand what to delete, go back and copy the entire Caches folder to desktop (for backup). Next, open the Caches folder, press Command + A, right-click, and then Move to Trash. Finally, empty the Trash. See if everything works properly or not. In case not, copy the contents of the backup Caches folder from desktop inside the actual Caches folder.

Clearing browser cache and website files for Safari also reduce the Other storage.

Clear Temporary Files Located in Other Storage on Mac

1. From Finder, click on Go.
2. Press the option key.
3. Click on Library.
4. Click on Application Support.
5. Delete files from here that you do not need. For example, old app folders that you do not need or have.

Remove Safari Extensions on Mac

At times, we install a browser extension for a purpose, and then do not reuse them or simply forget that it exists. The extension continues to occupy space (shown differently than the application itself. It is thus categorized under Other)

To remove an extension: Drive genius 5 1 0.

• Safari: Open Safari → Click on Safari from top left → Preferences → Extensions → Click on an extension → Choose Uninstall.
• Chrome: Open Chrome → Extensions icon (puzzle icon next to account picture) → Manage Extensions → Remove those you do not use.

Remove Old Downloads

Downloads are usually saved in the Downloads folder (unless you changed them). We often download .dmg files, large packages, videos, zip files, and leave them there. For example, many people do not delete the .dmg file even after app installation. Same for zip files.

1. Open Finder and click on Downloads from the left sidebar.
2. Click on the word ‘Size' to arrange the items by size. This will help you locate the large files quickly.
3. To delete, right-click on the file and choose Move to Trash. You may also select the files(s) and press Command + Delete.

Tip: Use Spotlight Search to search for big file types like – .dmg, .zip, .mp4, .mkv, .avi, etc. Then click on Show all in Finder… from the lower-left of the Spotlight Search screen. Next, you can delete them easily.

Delete Unnecessary iPhone and iPad Backups

iOS and iPadOS device backups might run into various gigabytes. If you have several archived backups or unnecessary backups of old devices, make sure to delete them.

1. Click on the Apple logo and choose About This Mac.
2. Click on Storage → Manage.
3. Select iOS Files from the sidebar.
4. Click on the files and choose Delete.

Note: If you accidentally delete a backup, go ahead and easily create a new one now.

Delete Unused Applications

How To Find Out What's Taking Up Space On Mac

Applications, when combined with their data, folders, etc. might be vast and occupy significant space. If you have several apps that are sitting idle, go ahead and delete them. Additionally, remove macOS install files, if any.

1. Click on the Apple logo from the top-left and choose About This Mac.
2. Click on Storage. Next, click on Manage.
3. Select Applications from the sidebar.
4. Click on an unnecessary one and then click on Delete.

Note: You may also use apps like App Cleaner for perfect uninstallation.

Check out How To Figure Out What Is Taking Up Space On Your Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. I'm going to show you how to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive without having to buy any third party apps.MacMost is brought to you thanks to a community of supporters. Join us and get exclusive content at MacMost.com/patreon.So on forums all over the internet I see Mac users asking how they can figure out what's taking up space on their hard drive and people answering with third party apps that you have to buy and install to figure it out. You don't need any of that. It's pretty easy to figure out what's taking up space on your hard drive by just using the Finder.Let's start off by making sure we're in the Finder. Once we're there let's create a new Finder window. Now basically we're playing detective. We want to start at the top and start looking down at all the folders on our drive. We're going to use Go and Computer. This takes you to the top level. You can see I've got a couple of external drives but the drive I'm interested in is my main internal drive called Macintosh HD. I'll go into that and I'll see the main folders there. You're always going to see Applications, Library, System, and Users. Now from this point we want to pay attention to what's taking up space.So we're going to switch to List View. I'm going to click this button here and to go to List View. Now I've got columns here. I can adjust the columns to move them around. I want to see the Size column. That's the one I'm mostly interested in. So make sure that's within view. You're going to see these little dashes here. It's not going to calculate the size of folders. That's pretty hard to do because It has got to look at every file in that folder, figure out the file size, and add them all up. Folders like Applications and System have tons of files in them. But you can force it to give you a size here by going to View, Show View Options, note this is Command J.Here there is an option called Calculate All Sizes. We're going to check that. Then we're going to wait for it to replace these dashes with actual numbers. Give it a few minutes to do that. For me it took a few minutes for the Applications' folder size to appear and a few minutes after that for the Users' folder to appear. So Applications, of course, is where all your apps are stored and it's always going to be pretty big. Your Library folder and your System folder together make up the system. Most of the big files you're going to find in the Library folder. The System folder itself should never get too big. That's just the size of the System. Users is where all of your documents and data files are kept. If you have multiple users on that Mac they are all going to be in there.So let's start by investigating the Applications folder. We don't need to double click it and open it up to see what's in there because in List View we can click on the Reveal triangle here to the left and it will open up and we can see all of the different files in there. Now if we click on Size it's going to sort everything by size. See the Users folder jumps to the top. The Applications folder is next and things inside the Applications folder are going to be sorted. So you can see I've got Xcode beta in there taking up a lot of space. Xcode is taking up a lot of space and on down. So I can ignore the small apps further down and pay attention to the big ones. Maybe there's an app in here that you can uninstall that's taking up a lot of space.We can close that and then we can look at the Library folder. Likewise in the Library folder you're going to probably find Application Support at the top. You can open that up as well and see what's taking up a lot of space in there. So here I've got Audio apps, Logic and GarageBand taking up a lot of space. I can look inside them and see some of the things in there. You can go further on down. So you can see Applications that you may be able to uninstall to get back space in your Library folder. Also in the Audio file I'll find more files supporting GarageBand specifically taking up a lot of space.So it's just a matter of looking through all of the things inside your Library folder and seeing what's taking up a lot fo space. If you don't recognize what it is maybe do a search for it to find out what this folder is for. Then you can make a decision from there whether or not you need it.Now your Users folder may be the largest user of space as it is for me. If I open it up I can see all the users on this machine. So that's my main user account. This is the user account I use to make videos and I have a few other demo accounts. This account here, the one I'm using, is taking up a decent amount of space. I can look inside that to figure out what's using a lot there. I can see under Movies I've got quite a bit. I've got a FinalCut bundle in there. So a Final Cut library that's taking up most of it. Then I can look in Pictures and see a decent amount of space being used for my photos library and that's how much is being used for music, etc. You may find something like a ton of stuff in your Downloads folder which solves the mystery. Now you just need to empty your Downloads folder of things you no longer need.Now notice something is missing here. 70 GB for this user folder. Then I've got this one that's less than 20 GB and another that's 3 and then everything is less than a GB. How can that add up to 70. It turns out that there's a hidden folder inside the User folder that's probably using a lot of space. That's the Library folder. Yes, we have this Library folder here. That's at the System level. That's the System Library folder. Inside of a User folder we've got another Library folder in each user's account. So in this case, in the MacMost account folder here, I'll double click it to go in it, you won't see that library folder. You can get to it by using Go holding the Option key down and go into library. But I don't actually want to see it here in the list. So I'm going to use that Command J again to bring up this list here. In addition to Calculate All Sizes I now have Show Library Folder. I'm going to use that and now Library appears. Let me adjust these columns here. I can see, sure enough, that accounts for all of the extra space. I can go through this Library folder just like I went through the System Library folder. Open it up and see what's inside. Let me Sort by Size here. I can see Application Support is the majority of it. I can open up Application Support I can see MobileSync is using a lot. Now MobileSync actually contains my backups for my iPhones. If you want to get rid of these iOS backups you go, in Mojave, go to iTunes, iTunes Preferences, then you click on Devices. Here are those backups, right there. So you can Delete them. Of course you may not want to delete them because they're useful as backups.Figuring out what's taking up space is only the first step. Now you've got to do something to clear out space. If there are documents in your User folder that you no longer need you may want to buy an external hard drive, archive those files to that drive, and get rid of them off your regular drive to clear space. If they're applications you want to uninstall them. Make sure you uninstall them properly which means using the official uninstaller provided by the developer or instructions on their site. If you've got the app in the App Mac Store use Launchpad to remove the app. If they are items say in the System or User Library folder you want to be careful. Deleting things from there can cause trouble. Can make apps stop working or even the system itself stop working. So you want to do some research. Look up that item. Do a search online to figure out what that folder is for and really know what you're doing before you remove items from your Library folder. A lot of times you actually go into an app to remove things. For instance FinalCut Pro has the ability to cleanup its own files inside of FinalCut. So you want to do that there and not mess around with the files directly. Cleaning out cache files is usually counterproductive as they usually speed up using your Mac. For instance the Browser cache files make it faster to browse the internet. Clearing those out may temporarily give you space back but then it's just going to fill up again and until it does that means you're going to be redownloading those files slowing down your internet browsing.Sometimes there's not much you can do. The apps that you've got and the documents you're storing on your hard drive are just taking up a lot of space. You may need to make some tough calls. Uninstall some applications you're not using as often, use iCloud Drive set to Optimize so that maybe some of your older files aren't going to take up space, and the next time you buy a new Mac make sure you get a larger hard drive.

When you check the storage on your Mac, you might see a significant percentage of space occupied by something called ‘Other. Catalina 2009 mac pro. Best mac antivirus and malware protection. ' macOS does not go into much detail. You may wonder what is Other storage on Mac, why it eats up so much space, and how can I delete it? Let me help by telling you more about this to free space on your Mac.

How to Check Storage on Mac

1. Click on the Apple logo from the top-left and choose About This Mac.
2. Click on Storage. Wait for a few seconds.
3. Take the mouse pointer to colored sections. You will see how much space is occupied by different categories like Apps, Photos, System, Trash, Other, etc.

What is Other on Mac Storage?

Just like the ‘Other' on iPhone and iPad, it is home to several files, cached data, and more. This section houses a mix of junk and important files.

In the simplest of terms, the 'Other' category is a combination of files that are not recognized as one of the other file types. Here are some examples:-

• • Common documents and file types, including PDF, doc, PSD, etc.
  • Any type of archives and disk images, including zips, dmg, iso, tar, etc.
  • Files in the system folders of macOS, including temporary files, swap, voices, etc.
  • Application Support files, iCloud files, Screensavers, etc.
  • Cache items, including browser cache and locally stored message media files.
  • Fonts, app accessories, application plugins, and app extensions.
  • Various file and file types not recognized by Spotlight, for example, a virtual machine hard drive, Windows Boot Camp partitions, etc.

How to Delete Other on Mac Storage

Delete Cache Files on Mac

In typical situations, you do not need to worry much about cache. macOS handles them smartly. But if you are too low on storage or believe in having the cache of unused/uninstalled apps, here is how to delete them.

Note: Fuel for keynote themes 2 0 download free. Caches are there to make your Mac experience better and faster. Make sure you remove only the unnecessary ones.

1. From Finder, click on Go.
2. Press the option key. You will see a new option for the Library. Click on it.
3. Click on Caches.
4. Right-click on unnecessary app/service folders and choose Move to Trash.
5. Right-click on the Trash icon and choose Empty Trash.

Note + Tip: With regular use, macOS will recreate these caches. If you do not understand what to delete, go back and copy the entire Caches folder to desktop (for backup). Next, open the Caches folder, press Command + A, right-click, and then Move to Trash. Finally, empty the Trash. See if everything works properly or not. In case not, copy the contents of the backup Caches folder from desktop inside the actual Caches folder.

Clearing browser cache and website files for Safari also reduce the Other storage.

Clear Temporary Files Located in Other Storage on Mac

1. From Finder, click on Go.
2. Press the option key.
3. Click on Library.
4. Click on Application Support.
5. Delete files from here that you do not need. For example, old app folders that you do not need or have.

Remove Safari Extensions on Mac

At times, we install a browser extension for a purpose, and then do not reuse them or simply forget that it exists. The extension continues to occupy space (shown differently than the application itself. It is thus categorized under Other)

To remove an extension: Drive genius 5 1 0.

• Safari: Open Safari → Click on Safari from top left → Preferences → Extensions → Click on an extension → Choose Uninstall.
• Chrome: Open Chrome → Extensions icon (puzzle icon next to account picture) → Manage Extensions → Remove those you do not use.

Remove Old Downloads

Downloads are usually saved in the Downloads folder (unless you changed them). We often download .dmg files, large packages, videos, zip files, and leave them there. For example, many people do not delete the .dmg file even after app installation. Same for zip files.

1. Open Finder and click on Downloads from the left sidebar.
2. Click on the word ‘Size' to arrange the items by size. This will help you locate the large files quickly.
3. To delete, right-click on the file and choose Move to Trash. You may also select the files(s) and press Command + Delete.

Tip: Use Spotlight Search to search for big file types like – .dmg, .zip, .mp4, .mkv, .avi, etc. Then click on Show all in Finder… from the lower-left of the Spotlight Search screen. Next, you can delete them easily.

Delete Unnecessary iPhone and iPad Backups

iOS and iPadOS device backups might run into various gigabytes. If you have several archived backups or unnecessary backups of old devices, make sure to delete them.

1. Click on the Apple logo and choose About This Mac.
2. Click on Storage → Manage.
3. Select iOS Files from the sidebar.
4. Click on the files and choose Delete.

Note: If you accidentally delete a backup, go ahead and easily create a new one now.

Delete Unused Applications

How To Find Out What's Taking Up Space On Mac

Applications, when combined with their data, folders, etc. might be vast and occupy significant space. If you have several apps that are sitting idle, go ahead and delete them. Additionally, remove macOS install files, if any.

1. Click on the Apple logo from the top-left and choose About This Mac.
2. Click on Storage. Next, click on Manage.
3. Select Applications from the sidebar.
4. Click on an unnecessary one and then click on Delete.

Note: You may also use apps like App Cleaner for perfect uninstallation.

Use Third-Party Software to Free Storage on Your Mac

Apart from the inbuilt solutions, several third-party apps do almost the same thing but in an easier way. You launch them, and in a minute or so, they will help you free significant space. The interface for most is visually pleasing. If you have difficulty following the above methods, you may try one of the apps listed below.

• DaisyDisk ($9.99)
• Onyx (free)
• CleanMyMac (free download with paid version $39.95)

Signing Off…

How To Find Out What S Taking Up Space On Mac

These are some of the effective ways to delete Other storage on Mac. As stated earlier, it has lots of useful files, too (that are different from listed categories). Thus it is tough to remove Otherdata entirely. But the above ways, help you declutter it. Next, it would be an excellent idea to know how to use optimized storage on Mac.

You may also read:

I have been an Apple user for over seven years now. Free slot machine games with bonus spins. At iGeeksBlog, I love creating how-tos and troubleshooting guides that help people do more with their iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, and Apple Watch. In my free time, I like to watch stand up comedy videos, tech documentaries, news debates, and political speeches.

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