How To Free Up Space On Mac Laptop

Get Rid Of Language Files

Mac applications have language files for every language. They might be using hundred of megabytes space for no reason. To get rid of language packs manually, perform the following steps:

Step 1: Head to applications and right-click on it.

Step 2: Choose ‘show package contents’ and click on ‘contents’.

Step 3: Now click on ‘res’ and get rid of the language you don’t need on your Mac.

Step 4: Repeat the steps for other applications.

How To Clear Memory On A Mac

If installing more RAM isn’t an option – or you want to attempt to fix the problem first – what can you do to address your Mac RAM problem?

One option is to use an app to clear your Mac’s RAM. We discuss a number of these options towards the end of this article. If you’d prefer to jump to that section click here: Best apps to clear Mac RAM.

However, before you install more RAM, or resort to downloading an app, there are a number of things you can do that might free up your RAM and fix your Mac’s memory problems.

Remove Unnecessary Time Machine Backups

MacOS will keep old Time Machine backups on your Mac. This can be problematic on devices with 128GB because the backups arent easily accessible and use a lot of space. Youre forced to use the Terminal and use commands to delete them individually. Heres how:

Step 1: Open Finder and select Applications listed on the left.

Step 2: Double-click to open the Utilities folder.

Step 3: Double-click to open the Terminal app.

Step 4: Type the following command and then press the Return key:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

As shown above, youll see a list of local Time Machine snapshots stored on your Mac. These files start with com.apple.TimeMachine and include the capture date. The files end with the .local extension.

Step 5: Type the following command, add a space, and then enter the numerical sequence in the files name:

sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots

For example, the command may read sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2020-12-22-130031.

Step 6: Press the Return key.

Step 7: Repeat step 5 for all remaining Time Machine backups. When the commands are entered successfully, Terminal will respond with a Delete Local Snapshot message.

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Fix #: Enable Compact Os

Compact OS is introduced with Windows 10. It decreases the operating system’s size using the combination of compression and software tricks. It also reduces the footprint of Windows apps to free up disk space, making sense in Windows disk cleanup.

Enabling Compact OS is easy. However, since you are handling the operating system, it is significant to create a system image backup before you proceed.

Step 1. Search for Command Prompt and run it as Administrator.

Step 2. Type the following command to compress Windows 10 and applications and press Enter:

Compact.exe /CompactOS:always

Step 3. This process will take around 20 minutes. When it finishes, you get 2GB around disk space.

Tip:

Best Ways To Free Up Hard Drive Space On Windows 10

Windows 10 includes several options to free up space when the hard drive on your device fills up. Although drives with multiple terabytes are common on laptops and desktop computers, it does not take a long time to stuff them up with documents, pictures, videos, apps, and games. And then, without warning, you will start noticing slow performance, problems saving files and many other issues.

If your device is running low on space, Windows 10 offers several tools to delete junk and temporary files, apps, and games to optimize the device storage. Using these tools will help you reclaim additional space, but it will improve the overall performance and problems during updates.

In this Windows 10 guide, we’ll walk you through the best tips to free up storage space on your device to make room to store more files and install feature updates without issues.

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How To Free Up Space On Mac: 8 Tips And Tricks You Need To Know

Need to clear some storage on your Mac? Here are several ways to free up space in macOS and reclaim your drive space.

The solid-state drive that came in your Mac is a double-edged sword. SSDs make computers incredibly fast. But because flash storage is expensive, the base iMacs and MacBooks still ship with a pretty small 256GB SSD. And upgrading to a bigger SSD costs hundreds of dollars.

If you’re stuck with limited storage space, you’ll need to be proactive. Take a look at these steps you can take to free up valuable storage space on your Mac. This way, your Mac won’t throw up the scary “Your disk is almost full” banner next time you’re downloading a big file.

Reduce Your Mac Photo Library

If you have a large photo library you might be thinking that you could save some space by deleting the hundreds of blurry or not-so-good photos. While there are apps that will offer to delete duplicate photos on your Mac

However, there is a much less effort way to reduce the amount of photos on your Mac: move them to iCloud.

We already touched on Photos above, when we mentioned that if you choose the Store in iCloud option in About This Mac > Storage > Manage you can choose to store your photos in iCloud.

The benefit of using iCloud Photo Library is that any photos you upload to your Mac in the future also appear on your other devices: iPhone, iPad and so on.

Our Photo library was 96GB we started off by paying for the 200GB of space Apple offers. Months later we had upgraded to the full 2TB as we were storing all our documents, desktop, photos and more in iCloud.

With that setting your library should eventually shrink as the high res versions of your images are switched for low-res versions. But note that you will also get low res versions of all the images you have on all of your devices, so it’s possible that you may not save a lot of space.

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Why Does My Mac Say My Disk Is Almost Full

The warning message indicating that your startup disk is almost full appears when there is no longer enough free space on your disk. This is often due to having too many files occupying your Macs hard drive, bringing free space to a dangerously low level. To resolve this issue, you need to free up some disk space.

Move Local Files To External Drive

To transfer existing files to an external storage, connect the drive that you will dedicate to the computer, and then use these steps:

After you complete the steps, you may need to repeat the same instructions to move additional apps or games to the new location.

When using this feature, the external drive always has to be connected to the computer. Otherwise, you won’t be able to launch the apps or play those games you moved to the new storage.

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Uninstall Unneeded Apps Properly

Uninstalling apps is much easier on a Mac than it is on Windows. With a Mac, you simply have to drop the app into the Trash bin and delete it.

The trouble is, like Windows, this does not completely uninstall it. Temp files are often left behind, building up a huge amount of crud that, over time, accumulates and takes up valuable space.

This is why I love the free AppCleaner.

With AppCleaner, you can either drag the app file onto AppCleaner and it will hunt down all of the associated files for you to delete at the same time.

Or you can set it so you can send the app file to the Trash and AppCleaner immediately opens by itself with all the related crud for you to nuke.

AppCleaner can also tell you how much space each app is taking up so you can decide if it is worth deleting it to make space.

And you can also remove widgets and plugins, which wont give back THAT much space, but every bit counts.

Fix #: Save New Files To Another Location

Instead of saving all your new files to the same location, save some of them to a different drive to free up disk space.

Step 1. Open the Start menu and select Settings -> System -> Storage.

Step 2. Under More storage settings, select “Change where new content is saved“.

Step 3. For each content type, select a drive to save new files from the drop-down menu.

Reading here, we hope you have resolved Windows disk cleanup. But if partition bar gets red from time to time, you still have the last choice

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Find Your Biggest Files

The first step is to find your biggest space hoggers.

Some things will be self-evident. If you use iMovie for example, video files youre currently working on will take up a tremendous amount of space. If you download music from iTunes, all those m4a files will be taking up a lot of space. If you use the Photos app, the photo library is likely to hog up a lot of space.

The iMovie library is in the Movies folder and mine is currently 12GB in size . iTunes media, including music and movies, is in the Music folder . The photos database is naturally in Pictures.

The best solution for things like iMovie and iTunes is simply to move the folders to a large USB stick or attached portable drive and point the apps to the new locations.

Xda Basics: How To Free Up Space On A Mac

Apple computers Macs are known for their durability and power. Take the new MacBook Pro models as an example theyre extremely capable, energy efficient, and merely unrivaled. Its important to keep your Mac protected from scratches and dust, so take a look on our list of best MacBook Pro cases. Another key to durability is keeping your Macs hard drive in check. A full storage can slow down your machine. So heres how to free up space on a Mac.

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Delete Your Duplicate Files

I often download an app twice by clicking on it several times or double-save a track to my iTunes library, which creates quite a mess. So if your Mac has started to run out of storage, there is a way to put an end to it. At first, you can try to find duplicates manually, but it can take you way too long with little to no result.

There is a good app called Gemini 2 – the duplicate finder. It allows you to clean out many gigabytes of duplicates in a few clicks. Plus, it allows you to check what would be deleted and deselect items you want to keep.

So, if your Mac is suffering from the invasion of the duplicates, give this software a try.

What Is ‘other’ On Mac Storage

In a nutshell, the ‘Other’ storage on a Mac consists of different types of files that don’t fall into any particular storage category . The Other category also includes junk files and personal files.

To clarify, it might contain the following file types: .pdf, .psd, .doc, browser caches, voice files, message media files stored locally, system caches, archive files like .zip and .dmg disk images, fonts, extensions, app plugins, and other files that dont belong to the categories above.

These ‘Other’ files can occupy a lot of disk spaceby cleaning out the ‘Other’ section on our Mac we were able to recover a whopping 26GB of storage!

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Free Up Space Emptying Recycle Bin On Windows 10

On Windows 10, when deleting files, the system does not erase them from the hard drive. Instead, they are placed inside the Recycle Bin in case you need them back. However, depending on how the feature is configured, over time, the Recycle Bin can take a lot of space, which means that emptying the bin is one of the first actions you should take to regain valuable storage space.

To empty the Recycle Bin to free up space on Windows 10, use these steps:

Once you complete the steps, the system will free up around ten percent of the drive capacity .

Delete Old Ios Backups

Backing up your iPhone and iPad is an integral part of data protection and simply a good habit to have. Thats being said, iOS backups are supposed to be temporary files rather than permanent residents on your Mac. Guess how much disk space you can reclaim if you help them to go: dozens of gigabytes.

Its fairly easy to optimize storage by deleting old iOS backups:

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How To Free Up Disk Space On Your Mac

Don’t have enough storage on your Apple computer for all the apps and documents you need? It’s time for some cleanup. Here’s how to free up disk space on your Mac.

If your Mac’s hard drive is bursting at the seamsslowing things down and leaving no room for new music, photos, and documentsit’s time to do a little cleaning. You could try your hand at manually weeding out unnecessary files, or you can turn to a few programs that will automate much of the process. Here are a few simple ways to clean up your Mac.

Remove Unused Apps And All Their Leftovers

macOS offers several ways of deleting unused applications.

Lets start with the simplest one:

You can also delete unused apps via Launchpad:

Heres how to properly delete apps and the system junk they leave using a cleaning utility in MacKeeper:

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Uninstall Windows Store Apps You No Longer Need

You can also uninstall Store apps you don’t want anymore.

Note: This will only uninstall Store apps from your user account.

Digging Deeper To Free Up Mac Storage

Daisy Disk

While using Finder and About This Mac are helpful, my favorite approach to tidying things up is with the visual drive analyzer Daisy Disk . It provides an interactive UI thats as functional as it is beautiful and you can preview and delete files directly within the app. You can also analyze external drives.

Daisy Disk offers a deeper look at your storage and can reveal temporary and hidden files so you know whats really taking up your disk space. And the colorful UI makes it fast and easy to spot really large files and folders.

The software even gives a free space and free + purgeable calculation. I use Daisy Disk three to four times a year, so the $9.99 price tag feels like a bargain for the benefits and time savings.

In my example above, I have 30.2GB used in hidden space. It turns out its the cache for Time Machine backups .

Clean My Mac and Sensei

A couple more handy options that can help save time by finding junk/purgeable files, uninstall apps, optimize performance and more are Clean My Mac X and Sensei. They dont give you a detailed disk analyzer quite like Daisy Disks UI but they do offer many useful utilities including storage management.

Both Sensei and Clean My Mac X are free downloads to check out with Sensei going for $29/year or $59 for a lifetime license. Clean My Mac X runs $35/year or $89 for a lifetime license.

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How To Delete Old Time Machine Backups

To delete old backups via Time Machine, do the following:

3. Look through your backups and choose the one to delete4. Click on the Gear icon in the Finder window5. Choose Delete Backup6. Confirm the action and enter your admin password