drive is not just full, but behaving oddly- perhaps losing space for no reason, or
refusing to free up space even after
emptying the Trash. Try Disk Utility to
check and repair the
drive before
resorting to this.
Belt and braces
We really can’t
emphasise this too
much: unless you
have a good reason
to take drastic
action, don’t. If you
do go for a reinstall,
remember that once you erase your drive,
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you restore them, is your backup – which
is the same as not having a backup.
If your work is synced to iCloud Drive,
that will serve as an extra backstop (and
don’t worry, although the act of
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delete it from iCloud Drive too, erasing
your whole drive leaves your iCloud
Drive intact, ready to sync back). If not,
try to make a separate copy of anything
important elsewhere.Step four: Rip it up and start again
Erasing a whole drive is possible, but you’ll need a backup.
FEATURE
Detox your Mac & iOS devicesDrive cloning
Duplicating a whole drive is another way to get a copy that you can restore
cleanly after erasing or keep as a backup. You can copy a drive to an empty
one using Disk Utility’s Restore function (see bit.ly/apple-diskutilrestore) or
create a disk image from it on another drive (see bit.ly/apple-diskutilcreate).
But any corruption may be duplicated, and there are complications to
imaging startup drives. Third-party utilities such as Carbon Copy Cloner (see
bombich.com) may be preferable.When you feel like your Mac
is hopelessly cluttered, it might seem
easier to delete everything and start
from scratch than work out what to
remove. If all your work, photos and
other content was in iCloud, you could
theoretically just erase your Macintosh
HD, reinstall macOS, then let everything
sync back. In reality, it’s never that neat,
and you’ll need to ensure that you don’t
lose any data.
One approach would be to manually
copy all of your own content to an
external drive, erase your startup drive
and reinstall macOS (see step 1
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macOS”, opposite), then copy everything
back. Time Machine can make this more
foolproof.
One approach would
be to manually copy all
of your own content to
an external drive, erase
your startup drive and
reinstall macOSSame again
In System Preferences > Time Machine,
check that you have a complete up-to-
date backup stored on your external
drive. Click Options
to check that you
haven’t excluded
anything from the
backup. Then follow
one of the processes
shown opposite,
either to restore the
whole backup or to
reinstall macOS
and then selectively
restore content.
Restoring everything isn’t logically
going to save any room, so the most
likely time to resort to this is if your