Finder, files, and apps

Navigate your storage and software with macOS’ convenience features

Contrary to myth, having thousands of small files all over your Mac’s startup drive won’t normally affect its performance. Nor do you need to defragment your hard disk, like in the old days — macOS takes care of that all by itself. The time to worry about space is when your drive gets within a few dozen gigabytes of full, and the place to do something about it is the Finder. We’ve also got tips and shortcuts for customizing your workspace and organizing apps, windows, files, and folders.

STORE CRAZY

From the Apple menu at the top–left of the screen, choose About This Mac. Click the Storage tab and wait a few seconds for an overview of how much space is used by what types of content on all the drives inside or connected to your Mac. You can click the Manage button for suggested ways to make more room, but to be honest we’re not big fans of this feature: it’s quite a minefield, encouraging you to turn on cloud sync options that have complex implications and to delete files without the usual safeguard of putting them in the Trash. You might want to click Optimize to automatically delete downloaded films and TV shows as you watch them — of course, you’ll still see them listed in the Apple TV app and can re–download them at no cost — or use Empty Trash Automatically to clear out your deleted files from the Trash after they’ve sat there for 30 days.

ERASE AHEAD

When you need to free up space on your startup drive, think big. First consider swathes of content you could leave in the cloud (like movie downloads) or archive onto an external drive (like those old work files you haven’t touched in five years). Then look for any big files you may not need. In the Finder, make a new window (Cmd+N) and set it to List view using the menu icon near the middle of the toolbar. Select your Mac under Locations and double– click Macintosh HD. Press Cmd+F (Find), select Other for the first criterion and pick File Size, set the option to “is greater than,” and set a biggish size, such as 100MB. Click the Size column header to see the biggest files first. Drag unwanted files to the Trash, after first dragging them to an external drive if you need to keep a copy. Remember, you won’t free up space until you empty the Trash.