2020-04-01 TechLife

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

Your Mac’s built-in primary drive, called

Macintosh HD by default, is where all

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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

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disk, just how much space they use. If it

shows that photos and/or music are the

major space hogs, we’ll cover that in a

few pages.

2

Manage

documents

Click Manage to open

the Storage

Management window.

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of the panes listed on

the left is

Recommendations. As well as options

to keep more content only in iCloud,

which we’ll look at over the page, this

lets you set the Trash to auto-empty and

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clutter”. This opens the Documents

pane, which deals

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anywhere in your

Home folder.

Large Files lists

only the biggest.

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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:

Identify

space hogs

and optimise

storage

The bigger the file, the more

you’ll gain by trashing it.

FEATURE

Detox your Mac & iOS devices

The status bar at the

foot of any Finder

window lists free space

on the current drive.

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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.