Managing storage on my Mac

A sighted friend is currently moving to a new Mac. When he tried to restore from his Time Machine backup, the new Mac told him there wasn't enough room. His home directory occupied 660GB.

That seemed huge, so I checked the size of my directory. It's 45GB. And after a couple hours of going through my contents and discarding things I no longer needed, I got it down to 24GB.

Before you go on a deletion rampage, make a full Time Machine backup.

Mac OS keeps unnecessary stuff around in a user directory called Shared. Start in your home directory. Go up one level to “Users”, then down into Shared. Mine contained several folders called “previously relocated items” - I deleted all of them and freed up 13GB.

Clear out your Downloads folder. Empty your Trash. If you don't do this regularly, it becomes a mass storage hog.

Do a web search for how to clean up your Mac. Most of these articles are shims to advertise apps that claim to do the work for you. Personally, I don't trust such apps, but I'd love to hear from others if they've found one that is reliable and accessible. Regardless, the articles often contain useful pointers and tips for clearing out unnecessary files.

The biggest types of files you typically find these days are large movie files and audio music libraries. If you can't live without this stuff, consider and external drive. I have a 2TB drive, partitioned into a filesystem to store my music, with the rest of the drive available for Time Machine.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

Oops. I wanted to share one more tip.

You'll probably want to know the total space occupied by a given folder. There are two ways to do this, each with their own drawbacks.

Method 1. Select the folder, then press Command+I. You can also go to File -> Get Info. In the Info window, VO+Right once to get the total size occupied by a folder and all its subfolders. If it's large, it might read as a hyphen. It will fill in a value after it has had time to calculate it.

The downside of the Get Info window is that it doesn't immediately update the folder size after you delete its contents, so it's hard to tell how much progress you're making.

Method 2. Open a Terminal window, and change directory to a folder. Then issue the command "du -sh *". This will display total sizes for the contents of your current folder. As you delete items, the sizes remain accurate. The drawback is that you need to be fluent with Terminal and the shell, so it's not an option for typical users.

Hi!
For approximately $320, you can buy a 4tb solid state drive (very fast) or an 18tb hard drive (very slow). Either will give you lots and lots of space for expansion. The solid state drive (SSD) is small. You can unplug it, put it in your pocket, and plug it into other Mac computers. smile

For clearing out junk, I recommend two apps: Clean My Mac X and Gemini. They are both quite accessible. I use them both. for things like anti-spyware protection, clearing out caches, app removal, and getting rid of large, old and/or duplicate files.

Good luck!

Bruce

Thanks, Bruce. I'll take a look at CleanMyMacX.

I gained back 6GB by deleting unneeded emails. Here's what I did.

Under the view menu, I turned off Organize by Conversation, then sorted by message size. This gave me the largest emails at the top of the list, usually with large attachments, making it easy for me to identify and delete the largest unneeded emails. I did this for all my folders.

Messages in the Sent folder do not automatically delete. I went to the Sent folder, selected all, and deleted. Then I went to the trash folder and deleted everything there. Trash does auto delete after some time, and I think it defaults to a month. You can change this under Mail Preferences.

My Mac Mini is now in good shape. The 256GB SSD now has about 60% free space. I have music and backups on an external hard drive as I mentioned. That means Mac OS, all applications, and my home directory total about 100GB.