Apple mac check hard drive space

Understanding What “Your Disk is Almost Full” Means

But Macs can actually have multiple trash cans, so you may need to empty several. This will delete all the files you sent to the trash from the Finder. The applications you have installed on your Mac are taking up space, of course. Some of these applications can be taking up a ton of space.

Options 1 and 2: From the Finder

To find out which applications are using up the most space, open a Finder window and select Applications. We were able to clear up over GB of space by finding and deleting some of these backup files. To delete them manually, you can open up the following path to see the backup folders, which will have random names, and you can delete the folders found inside.

Mac Startup Disk is Full - 15 Tips to Clear Disk Space

The easier and much safer way to delete them is to use CleanMyMac , which translates those confusing folders into actual backup names so you can decide which backup you actually want to delete. Just check the things you want to remove, and then click the Clean button. These files often take up disk space for no good reason. Mac OS X tries to automatically remove temporary files, but a dedicated application will likely find more files to clean up.

These caches contain files from web pages so your browser can load the web pages faster in the future.

1.How to check the current space on your Mac

Each browser limits its cache to a maximum amount of disk space, anyway. This will pull up a folder that has a ton of folders in it, which you can select and delete manually if you choose. You can clean up temporary files easier, and much safer, by using CleanMyMac. Just open it up and run through a scan, and then go into the System Junk section to identify all of the cache files and other things that you can clean up.

The thing about temporary files, of course, is that most of them are going to come back after you use your Mac for a while. So deleting temporary files is great, but only works for a while.

How To Check Hard Drive Space on Mac OS X

You can then delete these space hogs to free up space. If you care about these files, you may want to move them to external media — for example, if you have large video files, you may want to store them on an external hard drive rather than on your Mac.

Mac applications come with language files for every language they support. However, you probably just use a single language on your Mac, so those language files are just using hundreds of megabytes of space for no good reason. You can change the Mail settings to not download attachments automatically to save space, or run a cleanup tool to get rid of them.

You can run a scan, head to Mail Attachments, and see all of the attachments that can be deleted. Click Clean, and your hard drive will be free of them. This is especially true if you save each and every photo and video you take.

Six Apps to Analyze Disk Space

To keep your system from running out of space, the easiest thing to do is simply monitor your hard drive; however, Apple keeps this detail relatively hidden from you with the default configuration of OS X. Even so, there are options you can use to keep an eye on the free space available in your system. The first is to use the System Information utility, which can be accessed by choosing "About this Mac" from the Apple menu, and then clicking More Info.

In the panel that appears, you can click the Storage section to see a calculation of the free space and types of files on any locally mounted volume.


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While this offers a user-friendly graphic of your drive's space, keep in mind that the sizes reported are based on the system's Spotlight index. This means that if there is an indexing problem, it may show incorrect sizes in the About this Mac window. You can always force OS X to reindex the drive to clear such problems, but this can be time-consuming. Therefore, if you need to check your drive's space used, more appropriate tools to use are Disk Utility and the Finder's Information window, both of which will show you the exact amount of storage used on your drive.

Apple makes these tools convenient, but they will require you to either launch an application, or invoke the information window specifically using the contextual menu or the Command-i hot key.


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  6. If you wish to have a more readily available view of the free space on your system, then instead of using tools and information windows that require a few steps to invoke, simply enable the Finder's status bar, which will appear below each Finder window and will display not only the number of files in the current folder, but the amount of free space remaining on the drive. Finally, if you are a Terminal user, you have several commands at your fingertips that can give you disk usage information.

    Disk Inventory X

    The first is the classic "df" command, which will output a small table of details about your drive, including the number of blocks, those used, and those available. You can output this in a more readable format gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes , by using the "-H" flag in the following way:. In addition to "df," you can use Apple's provided "diskutil" command, which is a command-line version of Apple's Disk Utility program.

    This command offers the ability to look up disk information, which you can do for your boot drive by running the following command:. One of the lines of output from this command will be "Volume Free Space:" which will show in bytes how much space is free. To make this easier to read, you can filter the output to only show free space, by piping it through "grep" in the following way:. Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!