How to Free Up Space on Your Mac Quickly

The quickest way to free up space on a Mac is to check five places in this order: the Downloads folder, the Trash, old iPhone and iPad backups, app caches, and your largest files. The first three usually take a few minutes and need nothing but Finder. How much you get back depends entirely on what is on your disk, so treat any fixed number you read elsewhere with caution.

1. Sort the Downloads folder by size

Downloads is where installers, ZIP archives and files you opened once tend to stay.

1. Open Finder and choose Go > Downloads.
2. Switch to list view with View > as List.
3. Click the Size column header so the biggest items are at the top.
4. Drag anything you no longer need to the Trash. Disk images (.dmg) and installer packages (.pkg) for apps you have already installed are the usual candidates.

2. Empty the Trash

Moving a file to the Trash does not free any space. The space comes back only when the Trash is emptied.

1. Click the Trash icon in the Dock and look through it once, in case something is there by mistake.
2. Choose Finder > Empty Trash, or Control-click the Trash icon and choose Empty Trash.

If you would like macOS to do this for you, open System Settings > General > Storage and turn on Empty Trash automatically. Items are then removed after they have been in the Trash for 30 days.

3. Remove old iPhone and iPad backups

If you have ever backed up an iPhone or iPad to this Mac, the backup is still on the disk. A single backup is often several gigabytes and can be much more.

1. Connect the device and select it in the Finder sidebar.
2. On the General tab, click Manage Backups.
3. Select a backup you no longer need and click Delete Backup.

Keep the most recent backup of any device you still use, unless it also backs up to iCloud.

4. Clear app caches with care

Apps keep caches so they do not have to download or rebuild the same data again. Caches are safe to remove in the sense that apps recreate them, but an app may open slowly or sign you out of a session the first time afterwards.

1. Quit the apps you are about to clean.
2. In Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder, type ~/Library/Caches and press Return.
3. Sort by size. Open the largest folders and move their contents to the Trash, leaving the folders themselves in place.
4. Empty the Trash.

Stay inside ~/Library/Caches. Other folders in the Library hold settings and data that apps do not recreate.

5. Find your largest files

1. Open System Settings > General > Storage and wait for the bar to finish calculating.
2. Click the info button next to Documents.
3. Use the Large Files tab to see big files across your home folder, then delete the ones you do not need.

Old screen recordings, exported videos and virtual machine images are common finds here.

What MacPrune does about it

MacPrune v2.0 runs these checks as one scan. The Clean page sorts what it finds into three groups. Safe to clean covers user caches, browser caches, the Trash, system logs, Xcode data and package manager caches. Review before cleaning lists large files, downloads older than 90 days, duplicate downloads and mail attachments. Handle with care holds iOS backups and Docker data, so nothing in that group is chosen without you looking at it.

Everything you select moves to the Trash after a confirmation, and MacPrune then offers to empty the Trash, which is when the space is freed. The Large Files page lists files above a size you set, biggest first, and the Disk page draws a map where each folder is a tile sized by the space it takes.

The basic version is free: it scans everything and cleans user caches, browser caches and the Trash. Pro is a one-time purchase that unlocks the other categories. Details are on the pricing page.

Where to go next

If these five steps were not enough, the longer guide on how to free up Mac storage goes further. If the storage bar shows a large grey block, read how to clear System Data. And if the disk is full but you cannot see why, try Mac storage full with nothing to delete.