![]() My Mac is kind of small, so I set a monthly cron job to clean this up. Your caches live in ~/Library/Caches/ and you will want to go in there and clean out some stuff. Application Support is the next closest if you install and heavily use applications between clean sessions. Cleaning your CacheĬached files are the major recurring factor for what will eat up your space. Generally I don’t like to mess with system files so if you do, just don’t delete anything that affect core services. You can do the same thing with your /System/Library if you still need room. I don’t personally use iTunes so can’t help much here. You should clean old iPhone backups as well. ITunes saves a lot of junk so you can sift within the folder to find exactly you no longer need. I kept them both just in case I desperately need the New American version over the English version. There are two Oxford Dictionaries on my computer for some reason. I deleted all the dictionaries that were not English (Dutch, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese). OSX has a ton of dictionaries and you guessed it: (depending on your job) you probably don’t use most of them. If you don’t use the default images, this is a safe one to delete. It’s not that big a deal, but altogether they take a couple gigs. Mac has high res pictures for your screen saver, desktop, user pictures. ![]() This is more for developers, but compilers take up a huge amount of space. I deleted them without consequence, but maybe you should check the contents of yours. I’ve checked and they’re either old or incomplete updates. If you don’t type Japanese or Chinese, feel free to remove those. Specifically, I had foreign language fonts that I’ve never used. Librariesįonts take up a large amount of space and let’s be real - you probably don’t even use most of them. There are a lot of repetition and unneeded files here and between all of them you can probably clear up 10G depending on how long ago you last cleaned your Mac. Very broadly, /Library is accessible by everyone, /System/Library is used by the system, and ~/Library is used by the user. There are 3 types of Libraries: /Library System/Library and ~/Library. The (generally) largest but safer things to remove are Library files. The worst thing you can do is to be slightly too trigger-happy with rm -rf and spend the rest of the night mulling over your bad life decisions. I’ve found it’s more useful to run it in places I know take up a lot of space but want the breakdown for ( /Library, /Applications, or ~/Dropbox). Because it parses your entire directory tree, running this in your root directory may take a long time. This is essentially what all third party apps do when they scan your disk. This will recursively go through all the files and folders in your current directory and aggregate a list of their sizes. (for d in * do du -hs $d done) | gsort -h (If you don’t have Homebrew it’s highly recommended, but if you really don’t want to install it, you can change the command below to sort -n though it will make your life slightly harder). To see what files are eating up most of your space, you’ll need to scan your disk. This guide is on cleaning up system or hidden files that most users typically ignore or aren’t aware of. If you have enormous personal projects or media archives, then you should take care of that yourself (and you probably wouldn’t be here right now). OSX lumps files, caches, hidden files, and system files all under “Other”. Most likely, the “Other” Category will be the largest consumer of your available disk space. If your breakdown is dominated by media files, you can comb through your personal videos and pictures and back up/delete them as necessary. Last updated: 01/2017 See What is Taking Up Space It also assumes basic command-line knowledge. Disclosure: This writing is a result of my own findings.
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