Filter out the unwanted junk
Unearth wasted space, and keep your Mac tidy
Own a Mac for a while and it will accumulate cruft.
Unless you’re the most meticulous of Mac users, you’ll be storing documents and apps you no longer need. Perhaps things have got to the point that your desktop looks like the digital equivalent of an explosion in a paper factory. You’ve no idea where anything is unless Spotlight can unearth it, and occasionally glance in worried fashion at the rapidly diminishing ‘GB available’ figure in Finder’s status bar.
Optimise and tidy
Ideally, you should keep on top of things to avoid junk building up. Junk takes up space that could be better used for something else, including making your Mac nippier because empty drive storage can be utilised by various important system functions. Also, when performing initial backups, whether to local storage or the cloud, less data means faster completion times. And there’s a financial impact, too, in the sense you may think you need a 512GB SSD in your next Mac – but that’d be wasted money if 400GB of the files you move across don’t actually need to be retained.
First, we’ll look at optimising your Mac’s storage and keeping things tidy, to speed up backups and ensure you won’t run out of space. No single action takes long to implement, but you might get the odd surprise. We recently did a drive scan and were shocked to find a duplicate of an entire iTunes library, taking up over 100GB of storage space. You might not claw back quite as much room from your own Mac – but you never know until you take a look. And if your Mac has just 128GB of built-in storage, even the odd extra gigabyte or two will be welcome.