Criminy! Where does all this stuff come from? Suddenly MacBook’s spacious 512GB solid-state drive has 19GB left, and you start feeling pinched. It’s time to do some easy regular maintenance work!
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Before you consider buying a new internal or external drive, take the smart step: Sweep your laptop’s drive clean of unnecessary and space-hogging software and temporary files.
Clean things the manual way
If you’re willing to dig into your data a little, you have no reason to buy additional software to help you clean up your hard drive. All you really need is the willpower to announce, “I simply don’t need this application any longer.” (And, sometimes, that’s tougher than it might seem.)
Unnecessary files and unneeded folders
Consider all the stuff that you probably don’t really need:
- Game demos and shareware that you no longer play (or even remember)
- Movie trailers and other QuickTime video files that have long since passed into obscurity
- Temporary files that you created and promptly forgot
- Log files that chronicle application installations and errors
- ZIP and StuffIt archives that you downloaded and no longer covet
- iTunes music and videos that no longer appeal to your eye and ear
How hard is it to clean this stuff off your drive? Easier than you might think!
![Space Space](/uploads/1/2/6/4/126455964/534023597.jpg)
- You can easily delete files.
- You can move seldom used files and folders to external storage (such as a USB flash drive, an external hard drive, or a DVD) to free up space on your laptop’s internal drive.
- You can uninstall applications purchased from the App Store using Launchpad — from the Launchpad display, click and hold down the icon until it wiggles. If an X button appears on the icon, you can click the X to remove the application from your MacBook.
- You can get rid of an unnecessary application by deleting its application folder that was created during the installation process.
Always check the application’s README file and documentation for any special instructions before you manually delete any application’s folder! If you created any documents in that folder that you want to keep, don’t forget to move them before you trash the folder and its contents. In fact, some applications may come complete with their own uninstall utility, so checking the README file and documentation may save you unnecessary steps.
Removing an application or a file from your drive is usually two simple steps:
- Display the file or application folder in a Finder window.
- Delete the file or folder with one of these steps:
- Drag the icon to the Trash.
- Press cmd+Delete.
- Right-click the icon and choose Move to Trash.
- Select the icon and click the Delete button on the Finder toolbar (if you added one).
Truly, no big whoop.
Don’t forget to actually empty the Trash, or you’ll wonder why you aren’t regaining any drive space. (Mountain Lion works hard to store the contents of the Trash until you manually delete it, just in case you want to undelete something.) To get rid of that stuff permanently and reclaim the space, follow these steps:
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- Right-click the Trash icon in the Dock.
- Choose Empty Trash from the pop-up menu that appears.
Associated files in other folders
Some applications install files in different locations across your drive. (Applications in this category include Microsoft Office and Photoshop.) How can you clear out these orphan files after you delete the application folder?
The process is a little more involved than deleting a single folder, but it’s still no big whoop. Here’s the procedure:
- Click the Search text box in a Finder window.
- Type the name of the application in the Search text box.
- Decide which of these files belong to the to-be-deleted application.Be sure that the files you choose to delete are part of the deleted application. For example, a Keynote presentation with the name Instructions on Building with Adobe might not be part of Adobe Illustrator.Many associated files either
- Have the same icon as the parent application
- Are in the Preferences, Caches, or Application Support folders
- In the Search Results window, click the associated file(s) that you want to delete and just drag them to the Trash.Don’t empty the Trash immediately after you delete these files. Wait a few hours or a day. That way, if you realize that you deleted a file that you truly need, you can easily restore it from the Trash.
How to use a commercial cleanup tool
If you’d rather use a commercial application to help you clean up your drive, a number of them are available but most are shareware and perform only one task. For example, Tidy Up! 3 from Hyperbolic Software finds only duplicate files on your drive, matching by criteria such as filename, size, content, and extension.
For keeping your MacBook’s drive slim and trim, consider CCleaner for Mac, from Piriform. This great utility can clean everything from Internet crud (browser cookies and your surfing history) to the OS X system caches that can grow so doggone huge, and you can easily fine-tune what CCleaner for Mac will remove. The utility can also uninstall many applications for you with a single click.
So, your Mac is running out of storage. You try to figure out what’s taking up your disk space by clicking the Apple logo on the top-left of the screen, selecting About This Mac, and hitting the Storage tab.
To your surprise, you see a yellow bar representing “System” that seems to occupy way more space than you think it should. In the example above, it only shows 207 GB, but take a look at this Apple discussion — some Mac users report that System Storage takes an astonishing 250 GB.
Worse yet, you have no idea what’s included in “System” storage, because clicking the “Manage” button brings you to this System Information window… and the “System” row is greyed out.
Why does my Mac system require so much space?
What does it contain?
Is it safe to remove some of those system files?
How do I regain more storage space?
Questions like these may easily get to your head. Although my Mac now has a good amount of disk space available, I’m always wary of files that are taking up more space than they should.
I have no idea why “System” is greyed out while “Documents,” “System Junk,” “Trash,” etc. allow you to review the files based on size and type. My hunch is that Apple does this on purpose to prevent users from deleting system files that could lead to serious issues.
What Files Are Included in System Storage on Mac?
During my research, I found many people report that Apple counts iTunes backup files and app caches (e.g. Adobe video cache files) in the System category.
Since it’s greyed out and we are unable to click on that category for deeper analysis, we’ll have to use a third-party app to assist.
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CleanMyMac X is perfect for this kind of analysis. Since I tested the app in our best Mac cleaner review, it immediately came to my head when I saw “System” was greyed out in Storage. Note that CleanMyMac isn’t freeware, but the new “Space Lens” feature is free to use and it allows you to scan your Macintosh HD, and then show you an in-depth overview of what’s taking up disk space on your Mac.
Step 1:Download CleanMyMac and install the app on your Mac. Open it, under “Space Lens” module, first click the yellow “Grant Access” button to allow the app to access your Mac files and then select “Scan” to get started.
Step 2: Soon it’ll show you a folder/file tree and you can hover your cursor over each block (i.e. a folder). There you can find more details. In this case, I clicked “System” folder to continue.
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Step 3: The file breakdown below indicates that some Library and iOS Support files are the culprits.
The interesting part is that the System file size shown in CleanMyMac is much smaller than the size shown in System Information. This puzzles me and makes me believe that Apple definitely has counted some other files (not real system files) in the System category.
What are they? I have no clue, honestly. But as reported by other Mac users who experienced the same issue, they said Apple also considers app caches and iTunes backup files as System files.
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Out of curiosity, I ran CleanMyMac again for a quick scan. That app found 13.92 GB in iTunes Junk. Further review revealed that the junk files are old iOS device backups, software updates, broken downloads, etc.
But even after adding this amount to the original system files returned by CleanMyMac X, the total size is still a bit less than what’s returned in System Information.
If cleaning the System Storage is still not enough to bring your Mac available disk space to a normal level (i.e. 20% or more), see below.
What Else Can I Do to Reclaim More Disk Space?
There are tons of ways out there. Here are a few of my favorites that should help you get back a decent amount of space quickly.
1. Sort all files by size and delete old large files.
Open Finder, go to Recents and look at the Size column. Click on it to sort all recent files by file size (from large to small). You’ll have a clear overview of what items are eating up a large amount of space, e.g. From 1 GB to 10 GB, and from 100 MB to 1 GB.
On my MacBook Pro, I found a few large videos that could be transferred to an external drive.
Note: If the Size column doesn’t show up, click on the Settings icon and select Arrange By > Size.
2. Remove duplicate files.
Don’t forget those duplicates and similar files! They can stack up without you being aware of it. Finding them is sometimes time-consuming. That’s what Gemini 2 is designed for. Simply select a few frequently used folders (e.g. Documents, Downloads, etc.) in the main zone of Gemini.
It then scans them and returns all the duplicate files that might be worth removing. Of course, it’s always a good practice to review them before doing so. You can also read more from our detailed Gemini review here.
Wrapping It Up
Ever since Apple introduced the Optimized Storage feature, Mac users got the option of saving space by storing content in the cloud. Apple also has several new tools that make it easy to find and remove unneeded files.
That bar under the Storage tab is beautiful. It does allow you to get a quick overview of what’s taking up the most space on our hard drive. However, it still lacks insights into the “System” category as it’s greyed out.
Hopefully, the guides above have helped you figure out the reasons you’ve got so much “System” data, and most importantly you’ve reclaimed some disk space — especially for new MacBooks pre-installed with flash storage — every gigabyte is precious!