Working with an organized
Mac drive is completely time saving and yields better results.
Everybody wants to clean up Mac drive from unwanted junks and
duplicate data rather buying a brand new external drive. Most people
have 128GB or 256GB flash drives to store the memorable events such
as photographs, music, videos and games. They start using the drive
upto the maximum level after keeping 30GB free space on hard drive.
If the left free space on drive is less than a limit then OS X may
start to slow down and will scramble for accessing the large files.
If
you are in the spree of cleaning Mac drive then firstly, figure out
the causes, eating up the disk space unnecessarily. Although Mac
provides Activity Monitor to demonstrate the graphical representation
of hard drive but freeing up the disk
space manually by searching and removing the applications and support
files is not as easy as it seems like copy-paste.
If you are thinking like
others that 'where's the space gone on my Mac'
then here are the few tips to clean up Mac and
free up hard drive storage spaces.
- Free up Hard Drive Space by Emptying Trash
The first and the best way
is to clear the Trash area by right clicking on the Trash icon from
the dock. Click on the Empty Trash option
from the pop-up window to remove the files, existing over there.
 |
| Trash icon in dock |
- Free up Hard Drive Space by emptying iPhoto Trash
Although iPhoto has its
own trash to keep the deleted photos. Open iPhoto and click on Trash
from the left sidebar. Empty Trash option will be highlighted in the
top right side and to allow the removal of photos from iPhoto Trash.
Click OK.
 |
| iPhoto Trash |
- Free up Hard Drive Space by emptying iTunes Files
iTunes application manages
a lot of music files independently. Try to remove old iOS iTunes
update files and reclaim lost gigabytes Mac HDD space. Generally,
people select the apps, which needs to be deleted and press Delete
key from the keyboard. Don't forget to empty
the trash by clicking 'Move to Trash' button prompted after clicking
and pressing CTRL button together.
 |
| message prompted after deleting iTunes |
- Secure Empty Trash
If you want to delete a
locked file then it will deny from moving to Trash folder. At this
stage, you can use Secure Empty Trash option by right clicking on Trash icon and holding Command
key. If you delete any item from here then
it will be removed without taking care of its use by Mac OS X. you
can choose this option by Finder menu tab.
 |
| secure empty trash |
- Delete Large Applications & Files
Hard drive space can be
regained by deleting large files that are not in use. The best place
from where you can start your search is from Movies folder. Simply
drag any unwanted item into the Trash. Once you moved these items to
the trash. Don't forget to empty the Trash. You can sort the items by
Size to view the apps taking so much drive space. Though it is time
consuming activity but very worthy to obtain the unnecessary occupied
disk space.
- Clean up Downloads Section
We download tones of
applications and music files from App store and we hardly use twice
or thrice in a quarter. Remove the bunch of stuff downloaded from the
online stores, no longer needed. Moreover, if you are a frequent file
exchanger via Email then In the Finder, choose Go -> Go To Folder,
and then paste or type ~/Library/Mail Downloads—select everything
in the folder that appears, and then move the lot to the Trash.
By and large, after
following all the above tips, removal of unused video versions,
unused iOS backups and update files and Syncing with Dropbox also
make a huge difference in getting the hard drive space. Give it a try
and feel the difference.
