How Do I Free Up Space On Startup Disc Mac

When your startup disk is full or you see the alert of your disk is almost full on your Mac, you can just try the methods mentioned in this article to free up disk space and remove the warning. If you mistakenly delete important files, you can use Stellar Data Recovery for Mac to get them back. To turn off iCloud Drive entirely, deselect iCloud Drive. If you're using macOS Mojave or earlier, choose Apple menu System Preferences, click iCloud, then click Options next to iCloud Drive. Store in iCloud turns on the Desktop & Documents Folders and Optimize Mac Storage settings. In Photos, choose Photos Preferences, then click iCloud. Here are the steps: a). Connect the two Macs with a FireWire or Thunderbolt cable. Choose the Startup Disk option in the warning window. Then click Target Disk Mode button, when the computer has started up, a disk icon appears on the desktop of the other Mac.

How to free up space on Mac? I only have 6 GB left free on my Mac's hard drive and my startup disk is almost full. What are my options for freeing up disk space on it. I am considering uploading photos and other files to thumb drives and other files. Is this a good idea? Or, do I need another application (e.g. Mac Clean) to clean up my hard drive or some software about duplicate file finder mac? Any advice will be appreciated. - From Paul Claflin who wants to free up disk space.

Though it is possible for you to buy a Mac with a 750 GB hard disk, but Mac’s space will be filled up quickly if you have lots of media files such as movies, music and photos. Even a modest iTunes or iPhoto library can quickly fill up a MacBook Air’s 64GB or 128GB SSD, leaving little room for anything else. It is very terrible to have low space on Mac. For example, if the hard drive of your MacBook Pro is nearly full, it will results in problems such as MacBook Pro slow startup. But don’t worry, here we will show you how to free up disk space on Mac. Before you start freeing up space on Mac, there are things you have to do.

2 important things to do before you free up space on Mac

6 tips for freeing up disk space on Mac

Free Up Space On Mac

Delete Duplicate Files to Free Up Space

  • Find and delete duplicate photos, audios, videos, docs, archives, etc.
  • Also find similar images
  • Identify duplicates by content regardless of filename
  • Remove duplicates from Photos, iPhoto, iTunes & Music
  • Work with Mac's internal disk, external HD, SD card, USB flash drive, etc.
  • Make it easy & customizable to scan for duplicates
  • Let you preview images side by side within the app
  • Automatically select duplicates for you to delete with 1 click
  • Offer useful features such as Ignore List
  • Support macOS 10.10 or later, including Catalina
Free Download

Check Available Storage on Mac

Before I show you how to free up space on Mac, you need to find out how much disk space you have and see what's taking up space on Mac such as audios, movies, photos and applications. This information could be useful when your hard drive is nearly full and you need to clean up unimportant files. Below is how to check storage on Mac:

  1. From the Apple menu, select “About This Mac”. The Overview window appears.
  2. Click Storage. The window shown below appears.

Backup Your Mac Important or Useful Files

In order to avoid accidentally removing important files, you can backup your Mac files to Time Machine or to external hard drive first. Once you backup your file, you will get them back easily, otherwise you will need some data recovery software for Mac to recover your important files. But many free data recovery software can’t actually recover all your files if you don’t backup them. So you’d better backup files before cleaning up your Mac, follow this guide: Backup Mac in Three Easy Ways.

Mac

Tip 1. Find and Remove Mac Duplicate Files

You have to admit that lots of duplicate files take up much space on your Mac, and it is especially true if you have been using the Mac for a long time. Duplicate files are annoying and useless. Fortunately there are powerful apps like Cisdem Duplicate Finder that can be used to find and remove duplicate files with high speed, effectiveness and perfect accuracy. It can quickly find and remove duplicate photos, music files, videos, documents and other types of files in your folders, subfolders, internal and external hard drives. You can also use it to identify and delete iTunes duplicates and Photos duplicates.

With this easy-to-use duplicate file finder, you don't need a bigger hard drive. All you need is to clean things up. You can download it below and use it to free up disk space on Mac.

Tip 2. Uninstall Mac Unused Applications and Empty App Caches

Applications are rarely used or unused, these apps also take up lots of space. You can uninstall apps you got from Mac App Store or other websites. But you can’t uninstall apps that are part of OS X, such as Safari and Mail. And applications use caches to store various bits of information, but these files can grow very large over time and consume valuable disk space. You’d better empty these caches on Mac. More information about empting Safari cache, you can check this article: Clear Cache Safari on Mac.

Uninstall unused apps: Click the Launchpad icon in the Dock, hold down an app’s icon until all the icons begin to jiggle, then click an app’s delete button . If you later want the app, you can re-install it from the Mac App Store.

Apps that don’t have an uninstaller: In the Finder sidebar, click Applications. Drag the app from the Applications folder to the Trash (located at the end of the Dock), then choose Finder > Empty Trash.

Empty Application Caches: Most applications store their caches in one of the following two folders, and these cache files can be safely deleted, because an application will just create a new one when needed.

The system wide cache folder at /Macintosh HD/Library/Caches.

Your local user’s cache folder at ~/Library/Caches.

To clear your user cache and system cache, do the following:

  1. Open Finder and select 'Go to Folder' in the Go menu.
  2. Type in ~/Library/Caches and hit enter to proceed to this folder.
  3. Go into each of the folders and clean out everything.It is recommended to remove the insides of these folders, but not the folders themselves. You can also highlight and copy everything to a different folder just in case something goes wrong before clearing cache.

Tip 3. Locate and Delete Mac Large Files

To find large files on your Mac, you don’t have to buy a third-party software. You can use Mac’s built-in search tool to find large files and then you can delete unimportant large files or move useful large files to another disk. To find particularly large files on your Mac’s hard disk, the quickest way is to use Finder.

  1. Open a new Finder window. And click 'All My Files' or other hard drive devices name. Then it will list a number of files.
  2. Then click 'Action' in the menu bar and choose 'Arrange By', select Size. And you will see your files listed in different size groups. Choose the larger one that you don't need to delete and you will free up disk space.
How to clear up space on startup disc mac

Tip 4. Compress Files and Folders on Mac

Compressing files and folders into an archive that takes up less space is an effective way to free up space on Mac. Generally speaking, a zip file will be about 10% smaller than all of the files were before they were compressed, this feature works best with medium size files. So if you have many large files on Mac, you’d better compress them into an archive.

  1. Select multiple files and folders by holding down the Shift key (for multiple items) or the Command key (for several individual items) and clicking.
  2. Right click the files and folders, choose “Compress Items” and a compressed file with the .zip extension will be created. And you can delete the original files and folders.

Tip: If you want to expand an item, just double-click the .zip file. And you can classify your files and folders. Folders classification makes it easier for you to find what you want.

Tip 5. Move Mac Files to External Hard Disk

If your Mac storage space are almost occupied, you’d better move files and folders you don’t often use to an external disk. A hard disk drive is a data storage device used for storing and retrieving digital information using one or more rigid ('hard') rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material, you can buy one from the market. Below are the steps to move your files to external hard disk.

  1. Connect the external hard disk to your Mac using the USB cable.
  2. Select all your files you want to move and drag them to the hard disk.
  3. After all your files are moved to hard disk, you can eject the hard disk by clicking the eject button next to the hard disk’s name.

Tip 6. Clean up Mac Useless Files and Empty the Trash

The easiest way for you to free up space on Mac is to move some of the stuff that you don’t really need to trash and empty the trash. You can delete old and unwanted media files which often take up a large space. But these useless files you deleted before were moved to the trash and they are still on your Mac and take up your disk space. So how to clean up Mac hard drive and free up disk space, you need to actually empty your Mac trash. Below are the guidance to clean up disk files and empty the trash.

  1. Move your useless files to the trash by directly dragging the files to trash. And a warning will pop up, reminding you that once your trash is gone, it is gone.
  2. Click Finder > Empty Trash, and a small window will pop up, click OK. You can also choose Finder > Secure Empty Trash if you’re absolutely, positively certain that you want to get rid of the files, once you delete them, you won’t get them back.

Tip: If you want to prevent the Trash warning message from appearing, just turn off the warning in the Advanced pane of Finder preferences. Choose Finder > Preferences, click Advanced, then deselect “Show warning before emptying the Trash”.

These tips can help you free up disk space on Mac. Do you have any other idea to free up space on Mac? Share them with all of us by leaving a comment below.

Contents

  • How to free up space on a Mac?
    • How to see the used Storage on a Mac?
    • How to Fix Mac Startup Disk Full with pCloud Drive?
      • Note: If you have very low disk storage you must do the following:
    • Example:

If you are a Mac user and you have a smaller HDD Macbook, chances are you have seen this message at least once: “Your startup disk is almost full” or you want to know how to free up space.


In this article, I will explain why this happens and how to never see this warning ever again!

How to free up space on a Mac?

What is a “Mac Startup Disk”?

Your Mac startup disk is a volume or a partition of a drive that contains a usable operating system. You can set your Mac to automatically use a specific startup volume, or you can temporarily override this choice at startup.

What this means is that the startup disk is the “home” of all the files needed for starting your Mac and using it.

Without a startup disk, you will not be able to switch on your computer.

Why is my Mac “Startup Disk Full”?

In short, you have too many files. When this happens, it slows down all processes on your computer – see, in order to complete some tasks, your computer needs space to store temporary files and system files. When this happens and you run low on storage, the operating system needs to decide whether it can delete some files in order to complete the task. Most of the time this is not possible and the computer crashes or becomes very, very slow.

It is recommended that a startup disk should never be at above 85% of its capacity in order to work properly.

How to see the used Storage on a Mac?

If you want to see the exact types of files that are using the storage on your Mac:

      • Click the Apple in the top-left corner

      • Click on “Storage”

Currently, I have 73.9 GB used and 425.2 GB Free.

How To Free Up Space On My Mac Startup Disc

Most of my used storage is from “Other”

What is “Other” in the Mac Storage?

According to Apple, in OS X El Capitan or earlier versions, “Other” files are those that your Mac doesn’t recognize as belonging to any other category. These include files within disk images or archives, data stored by apps such as Contacts or Calendar, and app plug-ins or extensions. When your Mac is running in Safe Mode, all files are categorized as Other.

How to Fix Mac Startup Disk Full with pCloud Drive?

What is pCloud Drive

pCloud Drive is a desktop application that creates a secure virtual drive on your computer, which you can use to easily store, access and work with your files in the cloud.

How To Free Disk Space On Mac

To add files and folders to your pCloud Drive, simply drag and drop* your data into your virtual drive. You can then be sure that they are safely stored in the cloud and synchronized on all of your devices.

How

*for this to work fast you need to have at least some free storage on your startup disk. If you don’t, keep reading!

pCloud Drive provides a number of additional functionalities, such as integrated file sharing and synchronization through your computer.

Note: If you have very low disk storage you must do the following:

      • Choose the folder you want to Sync with pCloud:
      • Click on the pCloud icon and choose Sync to pCloud:
      • Create a folder on pCloud Drive:
      • Wait for the Sync to be completed:
      • This is very Important! After the Sync is finished, you must stop it with the cross icon:
      • After you stopped the Sync you can delete the files you just synchronized:
      • You can go to pCloud Drive and see the files you synced and use them as if they are on your computer! (A green icon means everything is synced.)

The app significantly eases your work upon performing file operations in the cloud, because with pCloud Drive you can work with your files using any software on your computer.

What this means is that if I have a vacation video in pCloud Drive I can watch it with no problem with the default video player on my computer. In my case VLC Player.

The best thing is that since the video is in pCloud Drive it is not actually on my computer but it’s in the cloud and does not take ANY of my Startup Disk Space!

Another awesome thing is that I can watch this video also on my phone with the pCloud mobile apps OR if I’m using a different computer that does not have pCloud Drive, I can watch it via Chrome, Firefox or any other internet browser. I just need to go to my.pcloud.com and sign in. Here is what I see:

Same thing works for:

Documents – I can open and edit them with any text editor with pCloud Drive or access them from any of the other apps. The same works for worksheets, PDFs, presentations etc.

Photos – I can open them, see them or edit them with Photoshop or any other image editor.

Audio files – I can listen to them on my default music player or with pCloud mobile and web apps music player. I can even create playlists within pCloud.

Every other type of file – As long as I have an app or a program to open the file with, there is no problem for pCloud Drive.

Nice right?!

What this means is that you can move all the files that are using your Mac Startup Disk Storage in pCloud Drive.

That way they WILL NOT use any of the space on your computer and you will still have access to them and use them with the apps installed.

Example:

I have a 512GB SSD Macbook Pro Retina. I also have a pCloud Premium account which is 500GB of storage. This makes my Macbook capable of storing 1TB worth of files.

Sharing with pCloud Drive

You can share any file or folder that you have in pCloud Drive.

You just right-click on the file or folder you want to share and choose if you want to invite someone to the folder or create a so called Download link.

This way you can collaborate with people or share the vacation photos and videos with your friends for example.

pCloud Speed

When you use pCloud Drive, you don’t even understand that your files are not stored locally. That’s because of the super high speed that we offer for uploading and downloading files. We compared our upload and download speed with the ones of Dropbox and here are the results for 1.12GB file:

pCloud Security

To guarantee your files’ safety, pCloud uses TLS/SSL encryption, applied when information is transferred from your device to the pCloud servers.

Your files are stored on at least three server locations in a highly secure data storage area.

How Do I Free Up Space On Startup Disc Mac Startup Disk Mac

Optionally, you can subscribe for pCloud Crypto and have your most important files encrypted and password protected. We provide the so-called client-side encryption, which, unlike server-side encryption, means that no one except you will have the keys for file decryption.

How To Clear Disk Space On Mac

Conclusion

A lot of Mac users have the same frustrating problem. Startup Disk Storage fills up quickly on smaller versions (128GB and 256GB) and if you use it for work, you can fill up a 512GB Mac very fast too. Especially if you are a designer or a video editor for example, and work with large files. And even if you are not creating huge files, with the pace we are creating information is growing very fast:

How To Clear Up Space On Startup Disc Mac

Just think about this: smartphones and cameras that can shoot RAW files and in 4K, which means you’ll have photos and videos of amazing quality – but they will also take a lot of memory so the more space you have, the better.

pCloud Drive helps you virtually add storage to your Mac (or any PC for that matter). You can move your photos, videos, music, documents any other kinds of files there and use them as if they are on your device with the apps you are used to. Also, you can access them on a smartphone via the pCloud mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile, and in a web browser when you go to the website and sign in.

P.S.

If you never want to run out of storage on your iPhone too, read this.