Spring Cleaning
Safety remove the clutter of redundant files from your Mac
Although macOS is very efficient in terms of using files, over time temporary data and third-party software can affect the speed of your system. These are the most common culprits when it comes to poor system performance. You may wonder how you can fix such issues if the files and apps causing the problems are still being accessed in macOS? The answer is safe mode – a special way of starting up your Mac whereby macOS will only load the software which was originally installed on the OS.
The safety of safe mode
In addition to preventing third-party apps from opening, safe mode will check your hard drive and try to repair corrupted files. It will also try to delete unnecessary system and kernel caches.
This guide assumes you are running the most recent version of macOS Sierra which has special options for configuring file storage. If you have not yet upgraded to Sierra, you can do so from the Mac App Store. To get started, shut down your Mac. When the Mac is fully powered off, press and hold down until you see the login window. Log in as normal. Note that if you have used FileVault to encrypt your disk, you may have to do this twice.
You will see a small, grey loading bar inching across the screen. This shows that the system is entering safe mode. If macOS needs to repair your disk or there are a large amount of cache files to clear, this can take some time, so be patient.
When the login screen appears, you will see the words Safe Boot in the menu bar. (Safe mode and safe boot are different names for the same thing). Log in to your own account as you would normally. Safe mode only uses very basic graphics drivers, so don’t worry if you see flickering on your screen. Once you’re on the desktop, click the and choose About this Mac from the menu bar. Next, click on the Storage tab, then the Manage button. The options in this window present several ways to save storage space.
Click the button next to Store in iCloud. You’ll see an option here to optimize your files in the Desktop and Documents folders, meaning it’ll put those folders and their contents in iCloud Drive. This makes them accessible to all devices on which you can access that storage area. As your Mac’s storage gets full, local copies of files will be removed to save space, though they’ll look like they’re where you left them and be retrieved from iCloud if you try to access them. This only improves performance if your internet connection is good. Also, iCloud only gives you 5GB of free storage, and it could take a long time to upload everything.
Click Optimize Storage to remove watched films and TV shows; you can always download
movies again. You can also choose only to download recent email attachments or, better yet, only download them when opened.
The third recommendation, Empty Trash Automatically, deletes files that have been there for over 30 days – Time Machine covers you against accidentally trashed and removed files.
The final recommendation, Reduce Clutter, identifies large files you may no longer need. Click Review Files to see an itemized list. You can hover over files either to delete them or show them in Finder. While this is a quick and easy way to delete large amounts of data, be careful not to remove anything important. Run a Time Machine backup before removing files. You can click the X next to some items to send them to the Trash. Others may be part of an app, and need to be deleted within it.
If a file or folder is taking up large amounts of space but you need to hang on to it, such as your iTunes Library, you may be able to store it online or on an external drive. Another regular culprit for hogging space is your Downloads folder. Items in here have been downloaded from the internet, so they are almost certainly replaceable. Click the Downloads tab to view and delete items.
On the subject of apps, take a look at the items in the Optimized Storage window’s sidebar that have data that’s taking up lots of space. If you back up your iOS device to the Mac, click “iOS Files” to see if any large backups are taking up space. You may prefer to remove these and switch to using iCloud for your device backups.
Go to System Preferences’ Users and Groups pane, then click Login Items. Click on the padlock icon (at the bottom left of the window) and enter your password to allow you to make changes. This area details which apps start when you first log in to your account. Click on an unnecessary app to highlight it, then the minus button. This doesn’t remove the app from your Mac, it just won’t start up as soon as the desktop appears, which can improve system performance.