One of the best practices for maintaining and improving your Mac's performance is to regularly clean your hard drive. A cluttered hard drive makes data retrieval slower, and you may notice your computer taking longer to start up or your apps being slower to use. Here's how to check and optimize your Mac's storage.
Maintain a clean computer desktop andHard Disk It's just as important as maintaining a clean home—when everything is where it needs to be, turning it on and off, everything flows better. If you find your computer isn't as fast as it once was, or if it's been several seasons since your last digital spring cleaning, follow these steps.
Check your MAC storage space
When cleaning up our data, the first thing we should ask ourselves is, “What’s taking up all of our hard drive space?” Sometimes, our precious memory can be used up entirely by taking a photo where we somehow took a thousand photos. Or maybe there’s a movie we downloaded a year ago that we forgot to delete when we finished watching it. Plus, there are dozens of relatively “small” things we no longer need that are taking up a significant portion of our memory.
So how do we know where our hard drive space is going?
Step 1: Click the Apple icon in the upper-left corner of your screen. Click About This Mac.
Step 2: Click the Storage tab. Your Mac may take some time to calculate where your storage space is being used.
Step 3: Once everything is uploaded, you'll see where all of your hard drive space is being used. Each category has its own color.
As you can see, most of the storage space used on this hard drive is used by the yellow images, followed by smaller rectangles in different colors. You can hover over each color group to see how much space is used for that category.
As you can see, iCloud uses about 44GB of storage space on this Mac.
Step 4: Click the “Manage” button on the right side of the window.
Step 5: A new window will appear with four different ways to help you manage your storage space. On the left side, you can see how much storage space each category uses to understand what else is using up storage space on your Mac.
Clicking on each of the tabs on the left side will reveal the files that are taking up precious hard drive space. You can open these files from here to refresh your memory (after all, who can remember what IMG_7024 is from a tiny thumbnail?) and decide whether to keep that file or not.
In iCloud
The first one will show you the documents you can store in iCloud. For example, photos (especially high-resolution, high-quality ones) take up a lot of space on your hard drive. Keeping them in the cloud will free up more space on your hard drive.
Optimize your storage
Under iCloud Storage, there's an Optimize Storage option. This feature will remove movies and TV shows you've already watched, leaving more room for new ones.
Empty the trash
Have you ever tossed a box into the microwave and needed to retrieve it from the trash can to remind yourself of the next step? Fortunately, our computers are designed the same way—we can still sift through trash cans to find deleted files.
However, like much of our trash, we need to get rid of it all to make more space. Setting up automatic trash emptying is a useful tool to use if you forget to regularly empty your trash every 30 days.
Reduce clutter
If you're an "out of sight, out of mind" type of person, chances are you have files you haven't opened in a long time. The Reduce Clutter option will list the files you haven't opened in different categories. Each tab will then show you the files in that folder that you might be interested in deleting.
Get rid of the old and embrace the new
Checking and optimizing your Mac's storage is important for reducing the drain on your computer's processing power. Additionally, keeping your Mac efficient and optimized will make using it smoother and give you more space for media and files that serve you better.
