Y
OUR MAC’S BUILT–IN primary
drive, called Macintosh HD by
default, is where all your files are
stored, unless you saved them to an
external drive. Check both for anything
you don’t need to keep.1
Get an overview
The status bar at the foot of any Finder
window (show or hide it with Cmd+/) lists
free space on the current drive. For more
detail, choose About This Mac from the
Apple menu and click the Storage tab.Wait for the chart to update fully and you
have a color–coded breakdown of all
drives. This doesn’t reflect how files are
arranged on the disk, just how much space
they use. If it shows that photos and/or
music are the major space hogs, turn to
page 24.2
Manage documents
Click Manage to open the Storage
Management window. You’ll see that the
first of the panes listed on the left is
Recommendations. As well as optionsto keep more content only in iCloud, which
we’ll look at over the page, this lets you
set the Trash to auto–empty and offers
a Review Files option to “reduce clutter”.
This opens the Documents pane, which
deals with files stored anywhere in your
Home folder.
Large Files lists only the biggest.
Simply click a file to show its location; click
Delete to erase it. File Browser shows
which folders contain the most data.
However, if you keep work outside your
Home folder, none of this may help much.Step one:
Lghqwli|#vsdfh#
hogs and
rswlpl}h#vwrudjh
The bigger the file, the more
you’ll gain by trashing itFind large files
>>> To search more widely
for files worth removing,
open a new window in the
Finder (Cmd+N) in List view (Cmd+2).
Click a drive or folder in the left
sidebar and press Cmd+F. Notice that
you can switch the search between
the current location and the whole
system (This Mac).
Click Kind and change it to File
Size, then switch “equals” to “is
greater than” and set a size, such as
50MB. Click the Size column heading
(twice if necessary) to see the biggest
files first. Click any you don’t need and
press Cmd+Left Arrow to delete.1
Time Machine Prefs
Be sure you have a backup before
you start deleting files. Time Machine
is an easy way to keep a backup of your
Mac and attached drives. Open System
Preferences and click Time Machine.2
Select a backup drive
Use a Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
formatted USB or Thunderbolt hard disk
or SSD, an Apple AirPort Time Capsule,
or a NAS unit with Time Machine
compatibility. Click Select Backup Disk.HOW TO BACK UP WITH TIME MACHINE
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