Get moving

Use external drives for space–hogging files

best clean–up and organizational efforts, if your Mac still feels a little wheezy, one solution could be to move some of the biggest space hogs onto an external drive. This frees up space on your boot drive for the Mac to use as virtual memory, speeding it up and benefiting greatly when you have multiple applications open at once.

If you have a lot of documents on your Mac, consider moving them to a cloud storage service such as iCloud or Dropbox. Not only does this save local drive space by not having them stored on your Mac, you can access and edit them from any computer or mobile device with an internet connection.

But the biggest space hogs on your Mac are likely to be your media libraries, namely

Athose associated with the Music, TV and Photos apps. Naturally, you can move these to the cloud too if you wish; for example, if you subscribe to Apple Music you can keep your tunes in the cloud. In Photos, open Settings from the Photos menu, and in the iCloud tab, make sure iCloud Photos is checked and Optimize Mac Storage is chosen. For the TV app, turn Automatic Downloads off in the

An external drive is a hard drive or solid–state drive (SSD) that plugs into your Mac. A desktop drive requires its own power supply; a portable drive is powered by the data cable. A NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive is connected to your router, and accessed through your network. Make sure your external drive is formatted for the Mac first — APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. app’s Settings and stream instead of downloading. If you prefer to move your Photos, TV and Music libraries to a local external drive (make sure you have a Time Machine backup in case things go awry), follow our walkthrough on the page opposite. You can use a similar technique with large or rarely used files too.