What’s the best way to free up storage on my Mac?
QMy 2011 MacBook Pro, with a 320GB drive, is running out of space. Much of its storage is being taken up by music and movies. Can I move them to an external drive, or put them in the cloud?
by Eugene Harrelson
AApple provides storage as part of iCloud, but to free up a lot of space on your Mac, you’ll have to rent more on iCloud – you get 5GB for nothing, and if you want more, you’ll incur a monthly charge; you can have up to 2TB of iCloud storage at this time – see apple.co/2jBePMe for pricing.
For movies and TV shows bought from the iTunes Store, it’s simplest to stop storing them locally. You’ll only want to watch one or two movies in the next day or so; leave those on your Mac, and remove all other movies and TV shows – you can redownload them later on.
In iTunes, select a film that’s stored locally, then choose Film > Remove Download. To watch it, you’ll need to download it again, but it remains available and costs nothing extra to redownload (unless your internet service provider charges for heavy bandwidth usage). Do this for TV shows and other large content, such as iOS apps downloaded through iTunes.
You could move your iTunes Library to an external drive, but it'll only be available when that’s connected. Consider adding a special SD card that fits entirely in the SDXC slot. Be wary of using apps that claim to ‘clean up’ storage, though a tool like DaisyDisk can help identify what you might move to such SD storage.