Macs need cleaning both inside and out, so we touch on both of these points, plus 5 easy things you can do to clean your software and hardware for a better running computer.
- New Hard Drive For Macbook
- Check Free Space On Mac
- Free Disk Space On Mac
- Free Space On Mac
- Free Up Hard Drive Space Mac
Delete temporary internet files
If left unattended, files like these can build up and potentially slow down your machine. This is if they play a part, among other files, in stopping you from having the necessary 10 - 20 GB free hard drive space your Mac needs to work properly. As a quick win, the good news is that cleaning these files can rapidly free up some hard disk space anyway. So, let's quickly run through how to clean up a Mac that's using the popular browsers Safari and Google Chrome before jumping to the next topic. If you're a Google Chrome user, click the three-dot menu on the top-right corner of your browser screen, go to 'Tools' and then 'Clear browsing data'. For Apple's Safari, it's a similar process. Click the drop-down menu named 'Develop' and click on the part of the menu saying 'Empty caches'. Browser data is fairly easy to clear, but that doesn't account for other annoying files most computers, like your Mac, collect. CCleaner for Mac can help with these and also clean web browsers.
Clean the outside
How To Check Mac’s Free Hard Drive Space - macOS Big Sur.Many Mac users have encountered a message stating that their startup disk is almost full.
Getting macOS running well by cleaning out junk files and more is the main priority, but if you need to clean the outside of your Mac because you're selling it on or you own a shared household computer - keep reading. If you're wondering how to clean a Mac in this way, Apple has some great recommendations of their own. Whether you're the proud owner of an Apple Notebook or Desktop device, it's recommended that you steer well clear of cleaning chemicals, abrasives, or aerosol sprays that could damage the surfaces of your Mac. Your best bet is a nice and simple lint-free cloth that's slightly damp, and be careful not to let moisture get to the inner components of your Mac. Now let's return to our main topic.
- This is if they play a part, among other files, in stopping you from having the necessary 10 - 20 GB free hard drive space your Mac needs to work properly. As a quick win, the good news is that cleaning these files can rapidly free up some hard disk space anyway.
- Most powerful and beautiful disk space saving app on the Mac app store. Time to find you much needed space on your drive. Clean & create gigabytes of unneeded and unwanted files on your drive in a few clicks. In addition, in one click, view Large Files over 100 MB organized by largest to smallest. To make sure you never delete an item.
Disable startup programs
If you've had your Mac a while or you use it a lot, there's a possibility that you've installed a lot of apps on macOS. This becomes an issue if nearly half of these launch by themselves every time you start your computer. You need some of these programs but others could be sapping valuable processing power from your machine, particularly if you don't need to use them regularly or you've stopped using them altogether.
macOS gives you a way to fix this. Visit 'System Preferences', go to 'Users & Groups', and find and click on your username. For the next step, click 'Login Items'. From here, you can find and select any apps you don't want to launch during your Mac's startup process. Going through these simple steps should help to speed up your Mac. If you haven't checked out our website before, what you may not know is that CCleaner for Mac has a really easy way of solving this problem too, one of the many features that we've built into our app.
Repair your disk permissions
Disk permissions help stop third-party apps from interfering with your Mac. If these get broken, they can meddle with how your Mac accesses files. An obvious sign of this could be if your macOS applications aren't starting properly, crashing, or just generally don't perform as normal.
macOS does provide a way of fixing this, including older El Capitan versions of the operating system. One of these involves specific command prompts to access the right information.
For versions of macOS that are El Capitan or older, place this command (below) into the 'Terminal' window (excluding the inverted commas):
'sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --verify --standard-pkgs /'
Doing this helps your Mac check whether it has valid permissions. If you see 'permissions differ' appear at any point, you can fix this with this command:
'sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --repair --standard-pkgs -- volume /'
If you're not confident about how your Mac's software works, we understand using 'Terminal' might seem a bit intimidating. That's exactly why CCleaner includes 'Repair Permissions' as one of many features of CCleaner for Mac. If you want to know how to clean a Mac so that it runs more efficiently, this is definitely worth considering. It takes the stress out of you having to do some technical investigation yourself - easily identifying any offending mismatched 'permissions' after running a quick search across your system. It also makes it easy to delete them.
Download CCleaner for Mac
macOS has various in-built features to help you with the upkeep of your Mac's software and hardware, but going through all of these can potentially be time-consuming and may require some specific technical knowledge you don't necessarily have time to learn. If you want to find out how to clean a Mac and want a simple solution, the good news is that CCleaner for Mac has most of the important areas covered. It can free up valuable hard disk space by cleaning unnecessary files, disabling unnecessary startup programs, and even makes uninstalling unused apps taking up space on your hard disk very easy too.
To find out more about it, see here.
How to Clean Your Mac's Hard Disk Drive?
New Hard Drive For Macbook
SSD (Solid State Drives) is fast, stable, and offers great performance. Unfortunately, compared to HDDs (Hard Disk Drives), the capacity-to-cost ratio is not good. There are, however, methods to free up hard drives to obtain additional capacity for computer systems, including the macOS.
Certain data and files are important, and you will not want to delete or move them. However, some files are redundant and can be removed without consequences. If you know which files you can safely delete, you can free up this space. Although the Windows operating system is known for inefficient clutter, the macOS also produces unnecessary files that take valuable disk space. In this article, we describe some methods on how to clean macOS disk space.
Video showing How to Obtain Free Space on Your Mac's Drive
Table of Contents:
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Inspect the drive to ensure that the system is running out of free space
Some issues relating to lack of storage might be difficult to determine and can even be a result of fake error logs. So, first, ensure that the system is, in fact, running out of free space. There are two methods to check available space on a hard drive:
1. Access the Apple menu and select About this Mac. Choose the Storage tab.
2. More detailed information can be found within the Disk Utility feature, which is located in the Applications folder under Utilities. Once Disk Utility is launched, select the drive connected to the Mac.
Begin by cleaning Trash
Once you are sure that the drive is actually full, the next step is to simply clean the computer (as if you were cleaning your home: you empty the trash). Open the Finder menu and choose Empty Trash. Bear in mind that some applications, such as Mail, iMovie, iPhoto, and others, have their own Trash. To clean those apps, follow the steps below:
1. Click Mailbox and choose Erase Deleted Items.
2. Select In All Account and Mailbox.
3. Finally click Erase Junk.
Alternatively, to avoid permanently losing your files, choose to archive your emails by following the steps below.
iPhoto
1. Click on iPhoto from the menu at the top of the screen.
2. Choose Empty iPhoto Trash.
iMovie
1. Click on File from the menu on top of your screen.
2. Select Move to Trash or File.
3. Then choose Move Rejected Clipsto Trash.
Clear unnecessary Downloads
The Downloads folder stores all files downloaded from the Internet. Often, these are forgotten after use and continue to use storage space. This is an excellent area to address when looking to free up space on your drive. Delete all redundant Download files.
1. Open Finder.
2. In the sidebar, choose the Downloads folder. Disk image (.dmg) files commonly occupy the most unused storage space.
Remove unused applications
Unused apps in isolation might not take up a great deal of space, but the amount of hard drive storage used by them collectively can be significant. Furthermore, removing apps on Macs is simple, especially those installed through App Store.
1. To delete them, open Launchpad.
2. Click and hold the program's icon you wish to remove.
3. When the icon starts to animate, click the Delete (x) button.
4. To delete any other app, drag the icon to Trash and then empty Trash.
Make space without losing any data
The best way to gain extra space on the Mac is to move non-executable files such as photos, movies, documents, and any large files, to add external storage, for example, an external drive, USB drive, DVD/CD drive, or cloud storage.
Compress large items
Another method to obtain some free space is to compress files. Compressed files remain on the computer but occupy less space. On the other hand, this can be less efficient than deleting or moving files to external storage. To find the largest files on the drive, follow the steps below:
Check Free Space On Mac
1. Open Finder from the sidebar.
2. Select the Device (the label you provided) and type criteria into the search field.
3. When your search location appears (for example, This Mac), click the Add (+) button.
4. Click the first drop-down menu, and choose Other.
5. Find the logical size option, enable it, and then click OK.
Free Disk Space On Mac
6. Choose the 'is greater than' condition and type the amount (i.e., 50 Mb).
7. To compress items, right-click or hold Control and left-click it, and then select the Compress 'name' option.
If you are using an earlier version of macOS:
1. Click Go from the Finder menu and select Home.
2. Choose File, click Find and open the Find menu.
3. Find the File size option.
4. Choose the 'is greater than' condition and type the amount (i.e., 50 Mb).
5. To compress items, right-click or hold Control and left-click it, and then select the Compress 'name' option.
6. To archive, your emails, open the Mail application and select a folder you wish to archive (e.g., Inbox).
7. Drag it to the desktop. The mbox folder will appear on your desktop.
8. Right-click it or use the Control and left-click combination, and select Compress 'Inbox.mbox'.
9. Now you can delete your messages from Mail.
Delete unnecessary temporary files, system caches, and logs
System stores several System logs and temporary files - deleting them will increase the available space on your drive. To clean the system from this type of file, we recommendCombo Cleaneror other third-party applications.
Free Space On Mac
Clear the browser cache storage
Free Up Hard Drive Space Mac
Browsers store website data such as cookies and cache information. Cleaning these hidden files might free up storage space. To clean up Safari, simply click Safari on the menu at the top of the screen and select Clear History. Browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox can be cleaned similarly.