Home
LD42 - No Disk Space Mac OS

LD42 - No Disk Space Mac OS

May 29 2021

LD42 - No Disk Space Mac OS

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.6.4), Late 2008 Rev C 120GB HDD Posted on Apr 17, 2011 12:38 AM. Now that we know basic ways for how to free up disk space on Mac, it’s time to try some pro methods. No Mac disk cleanup is complete unless you remove junk files — huge space-gobblers that silently eat up your storage. Let’s see where they’re hiding: Open Finder and click Go at the top menu.

How to free up space on a Mac? What is a “Mac Startup Disk”? Your Mac startup disk is a volume or a partition of a drive that contains a usable operating system. You can set your Mac to automatically use a specific startup volume, or you can temporarily override this choice at startup. Since Mac OS 10.7, Apple has also included a built-in tool to view both free disk space and detailed disk usage that can be accessed through the “About This Mac” window. Here’s how to see it. First, click on the “Apple” menu in the upper-left corner of the screen and select “About This Mac.”.

Optimised Storage helps you save storage space by storing your content in iCloud and making it available on demand:

  • When storage space is needed, files, photos, films, email attachments and other files that you rarely use are stored in iCloud automatically.
  • Each file stays exactly where you last saved it, and will download when you open it.
  • Files that you’ve used recently remain on your Mac, along with optimised versions of your photos.

If you haven't yet upgraded to macOS Sierra or later, find out about other ways to free up storage space.

Find out how much storage is available on your Mac

Choose Apple menu  > About This Mac and then click Storage. Each segment of the bar is an estimate of the storage space used by a category of files. Move your pointer over each segment for more detail.

Ld42 - no disk space mac os operating system

Click the Manage button to open the Storage Management window, pictured below.

Manage storage on your Mac

The Storage Management window offers recommendations for optimising your storage. If some recommendations have already been turned on, you will see fewer recommendations.

Store in iCloud

Click the Store in iCloud button and then choose from these options:

  • Desktop and Documents. Store all files from these two locations in iCloud Drive. When storage space is needed, only the files you recently opened are kept on your Mac, so that you can work offline easily. Files only stored in iCloud will display a download icon , which you can double-click to download the original file. Find out more about this feature.
  • Photos. Store all original, full-resolution photos and videos in iCloud Photos. When storage space is needed, only space-saving (optimised) versions of photos are kept on your Mac. To download the original photo or video, just open it.
  • Messages. Store all messages and attachments in iCloud. When storage space is needed, only the messages and attachments you recently opened are kept on your Mac. Find out more about Messages in iCloud.

Storing files in iCloud uses the storage space in your iCloud storage plan. If you reach or exceed your iCloud storage limit, you can either buy more iCloud storage or make more iCloud storage available. iCloud storage starts at 50 GB for $0.99 (USD) a month, and you can purchase additional storage directly from your Apple device. Find out more about the prices in your region.

Optimise Storage

Click the Optimise button to save space by automatically removing films and TV programmes you've watched. When storage space is needed, films or TV programmes that you've purchased from Apple and have already watched will be removed from your Mac. Click the download icon next to a film or TV programme to download it again.

Your Mac will also save space by only keeping recent email attachments on this Mac when storage space is needed. You can manually download any attachments at any time by opening the email or attachment, or saving the attachment to your Mac.

Optimising storage for films, TV programmes and email attachments doesn't require iCloud storage space.

L4d2 - No Disk Space Mac Os X

Empty Bin Automatically

Empty Bin Automatically permanently deletes files that have been in the Bin for more than 30 days.

Reduce Clutter

Reduce Clutter helps you identify large files and files you may no longer need. Click the Review Files button and then choose any of the file categories in the sidebar, such as Applications, Documents, Music Creation or Bin.

You can delete the files in some categories directly from this window. Other categories show the total storage space used by the files in each app. You can then open the app and decide whether to delete files from within it.

Find out how to re-download apps, music, films, TV programmes and books.


Where to find the settings for each feature

The button for each recommendation in the Storage Management window affects one or more settings in other apps. You can also control these settings directly within each app.

  • If you're using macOS Catalina or later, choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, click Apple ID, and then select iCloud in the sidebar: Store in iCloud turns on the Optimise Mac Storage setting on the right. To turn off iCloud Drive entirely, deselect iCloud Drive.
  • If you're using macOS Mojave or earlier, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click iCloud, then click Options next to iCloud Drive. Store in iCloud turns on the Desktop & Documents Folders and Optimise Mac Storage settings.
  • In Photos, choose Photos > Preferences and then click iCloud. Store in iCloud selects iCloud Photos and Optimise Mac Storage.
  • In Messages, choose Messages > Preferences, then click iMessage. Store in iCloud selects Enable Messages in iCloud.
  • If you're using macOS Catalina or later, open the Apple TV app, choose TV > Preferences from the menu bar, then click Files. Optimise Storage selects “Automatically delete watched films and TV programmes”.
  • In you're using macOS Mojave or earlier, open iTunes, choose iTunes > Preferences from the menu bar, then click Advanced. Optimise Storage selects “Automatically delete watched films and TV programmes”.
  • In Mail, choose Mail > Preferences from the menu bar and then click Accounts. In the Account Information section on the right, Optimise Storage sets the Download Attachments menu to either Recent or None.

Empty Bin Automatically: From the Finder, choose Finder > Preferences, then click Advanced. Empty Bin Automatically selects “Remove items from the Bin after 30 days”.

Other ways that macOS automatically helps to save space

With macOS Sierra or later, your Mac will take these additional steps automatically to save storage space:

  • Detects duplicate downloads in Safari, keeping only the most recent version of the download
  • Reminds you to delete used app installers
  • Removes old fonts, languages and dictionaries that aren't being used
  • Clears caches, logs and other unnecessary data when storage space is needed

How to free up storage space manually

Even without using the Optimised Storage features described in this article, you can take other steps to make more storage space available:

  • Music, films and other media can use a lot of storage space. Find out how to delete music, films and TV programmes from your device.
  • Delete other files that you no longer need by moving them to the Bin, then emptying the Bin. The Downloads folder is good place to look for files that you may no longer need.
  • Move files to an external storage device.
  • Compress files.
  • Delete unneeded email: In the Mail app, choose Mailbox > Erase Junk Mail. If you no longer need the email in your Deleted Items mailbox, choose Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items.

Learn more

  • The Storage pane of About This Mac is the best way to determine the amount of storage space available on your Mac. Disk Utility and other apps may show storage categories, such as Not Mounted, VM, Recovery, Other Volumes, Free or Purgeable. Don't rely on these categories to understand how to free up storage space or how much storage space is available for your data.
  • When you duplicate a file on an APFS-formatted volume, that file doesn't use additional storage space on the volume. Deleting a duplicate file only frees up the space required by any data that you might have added to the duplicate. If you no longer need any copies of the file, you can recover all of the storage space by deleting both the duplicate and the original file.
  • If you're using a pro app and Optimise Mac Storage, find out how to make sure your projects are always on your Mac and able to access their files.

Today in 2021, MacBooks are more spacious than ever. The new MacBook Air comes with a 256-GB hard drive. But no amount of storage seems to be enough as the ever-inflating digital media is taking over our hard drives. Cloud servers are only a partial answer to that. They aren’t getting cheaper and consume insane amounts of the world’s electricity. So if you want to take a load off your drive and help the planet, you should teach yourself a couple of storage-keeping tricks. Let’s go.

What’s causing low disk space on your Mac?

Before you begin to free up disk space, let’s identify what’s taking it up. From the Apple Menu in the upper left-hand corner of your screen, select About This Mac and then click the Storage tab in the window that opens. You’ll get a handy, color-coded graph that looks like this:

In the above example, you can see that apps, audio files, and “other” (for details on what this “other” category consists of, look here) are taking the most significant amount of space.

It’s nice to see what’s stored on your Mac, and even nicer to be able to browse the folders that contain the files themselves. Now that you’ve identified what’s on your drive let’s free up some space.

How to increase disk space on your Mac

There are several options here, so let’s go through a few.

1. Remove large and old files

Often the files that end up taking the most space are tucked away in “cold storage” on your computer. These are big movies, photos, or the like that you rarely look at but can’t part with, either. In this case, archiving the files and moving them to an external drive is a good way to free up storage space on your Mac.
Locating huge neglected files can be a pain, but it gets super easy with the CleanMyMac X app. It has a dedicated Large & Old File finder. It will help you find massive files and sort them by size to define the largest ones quickly.

You can download the free version of CleanMyMac X here.

As the name suggests, it finds files that occupy a lot of space on your disk but haven’t been opened for a long time. You can quickly review these files right in the app and decide which ones you want to remove. It’s a really handy feature if you have a lot of heavy stuff piled up.

2. Empty Trash

Review your Trash bin’s contents one last time before you empty it. Press Command and right-click the Trash folder on your Trash icon. Then, click Empty Trash to remove everything.

Use Command-Option-Delete to delete any folder immediately, bypassing Trash.

3. Clean up the Downloads folder

Files love to hide in your Mac’s Downloads folder. Old disk images, random photos, unused extensions, ZIP files… they’re all in there, not making a sound. Hiding. ? Go to Finder and browse what’s sitting in your Downloads, wasting space on your disk. Anything unnecessary can be dragged to the Trash.

4. Delete duplicate folders and files

How many times do we copy or download things twice? Like many users, I would prefer to have a backup twin of my important files. But that often ends up in my files being quadrupled…or what do they call a 4th or 5th copy of the same folder?

To effectively remove duplicate files and make space on Mac, you can use Gemini 2. This is how this app looks.

You can download this little duplicate finder here.

Gemini 2 analyzes potential duplicates by many criteria, not just the name of the file. It searches for:

  • Duplicate folders
  • Duplicate movies
  • Similar images

5. Learn to use Optimized Storage

Optimized Storage is the built-in feature of the macOS. It’s a sorting algorithm that shows different categories of files on your Mac for review and removal.

  1. Click the Apple Menu > About This Mac > Storage.
  2. Choose “Manage…”

L4d2 - No Disk Space Mac Os 11

By far, the most-space demanding of your files will be Applications.

Using the quick tabs above, you will decide what is there you can toss away. Make sure also to check Recommendations (on top of the list). There are a couple more space-saving options there.

6. Uninstall unused applications

If you’re like me, you often try an app “...just to see what it does”. While that’s fun, it frequently results in a slew of forgotten apps. It’s a good practice to set a reminder to review your Applications folder and clean out the ones you no longer use. However, note that simply dragging an app into your Mac’s trash doesn’t eliminate all of its related files.

L4d2 - No Disk Space Mac Os Pro

CleanMyMac X's Uninstaller feature, on the other hand, leaves no leftover pieces behind, which means more available space on your Mac. CleanMyMac X finds every app-related document and file, no matter where it has been tucked away and deletes it from your Mac.

And speaking of setting up a reminder, CleanMyMac’s scheduler will handle that task for you, too. Just tell it how often you’d like to be prompted to give your Mac a good cleaning and leave the rest to the app.

No Disk Space Virus

7. Delete your Desktop screenshots

Ld42 - No Disk Space Mac Os Operating System

Mac’s Desktop is where you keep screenshots by default. With a feature called “Stacks,” you can organize your Desktop into clearly labeled folders. One of such folders will be Screenshots, which you can later remove in one sweep.

  1. Go to your desktop.
  2. Right-click somewhere in the middle of your Desktop.
  3. Select “Use Stacks”

Now you should see the Screenshots folder with all your screengrabs neatly stuffed inside. Drag this folder to the Trash and empty it.

8. Get rid of system junk

It’s not just your files that are hogging disk space — it’s also useless system files like logs, cache, unused binaries, old iOS backups and installers, and what not. Fortunately, CleanMyMac can find and eliminate them all to make low disk space a thing of the past, at last.

System junk is comprised of:

  • User cache files
  • Application cache
  • Broken downloads
  • Unused .DMG installers

As you can see, the 'User cache' category alone can recover about 3 GB of space. So the best way to free up space on Mac is to start with this type of files.

With just a few clicks, you’ll discover what’s where and what’s ripe for deletion. The best way to free up hard drive space is to run CleanMyMac X and wave goodbye to space-hogging files. Don’t worry. You won’t miss them. Hopefully, you managed to clear a lot of disk space — drop by for more Mac housekeeping tips. 😉

LD42 - No Disk Space Mac OS

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply