How to Free Up Storage on Your Mac in 2026

To free up storage on a Mac, open System Settings > General > Storage to see which categories are largest, then work through the usual places: the Downloads folder and the Trash, apps you no longer use, old iPhone and iPad backups, large forgotten files, and caches. None of it needs extra software. The steps below apply to macOS 13 and later.

Step 1: See what is using the space

1. Open the Apple menu and choose System Settings.
2. Click General, then Storage.
3. Wait for the coloured bar to finish calculating. Under it is a list of categories such as Applications, Documents, Photos, Mail and System Data, each with its size.
4. Click the info button beside a category to see what is inside it.

Note the two or three largest categories. Those are where the time is worth spending.

Step 2: Clear Downloads, then empty the Trash

1. Open Finder and click Downloads in the sidebar.
2. Choose View > as List, then click the Size column heading so the biggest items come first.
3. Move what you no longer need to the Trash. Installers (.dmg and .pkg files) and archives you have already unpacked are the usual candidates.
4. Choose Finder > Empty Trash.

The last step matters. A file in the Trash still takes up space, so nothing is freed until the Trash is emptied.

Step 3: Remove apps you no longer use

1. In System Settings > General > Storage, click the info button beside Applications.
2. The list shows each app with its size and when it was last opened.
3. Select an app you have stopped using and delete it, or drag it from the Applications folder to the Trash.

Dragging an app to the Trash removes the app itself and usually leaves its support files, caches and preferences in your Library folder. Our guide on how to completely uninstall apps on a Mac shows where those are.

Step 4: Delete old iPhone and iPad backups

If you have ever backed up a phone or tablet to this Mac, the backups are still on the disk.

1. In the Storage list, click the info button beside iOS Files. The row only appears when backups exist.
2. Check the device name and date of each backup.
3. Delete backups of devices you no longer own, or older copies of a device that has a newer backup.

Take care here. A deleted backup cannot be rebuilt once the device is gone, so make sure anything you want from it lives somewhere else first.

Step 5: Find large files you forgot about

1. In the Storage list, click the info button beside Documents.
2. Open the Large Files tab and read down the list.
3. Move what you do not need to the Trash, or copy it to an external drive first.

If you use iCloud Photos, open Photos > Settings > iCloud. One option there keeps smaller versions of your pictures on the Mac and the full-size originals in iCloud, which helps when the Photos category is the biggest one.

Step 6: Clear caches with care

Apps keep caches so they do not have to fetch or rebuild the same data twice. Clearing them is safe in the sense that apps make them again, which also means some of the space comes back over time.

1. Quit the apps you are about to clean up after.
2. In Finder choose Go > Go to Folder and enter ~/Library/Caches.
3. Open the folders that belong to apps you recognise and move their contents to the Trash. Leave anything you cannot identify.
4. Restart the Mac, then empty the Trash.

Stay inside your own Library folder. Do not delete anything from /System. If the System Data category is the large one, see how to clear System Data on a Mac.

What MacPrune does about it

We built MacPrune to do this walk for you and show the result in one place. In MacPrune v2.0:

• Disk draws a map where every folder is a tile sized by the space it takes. The map is for looking only: nothing is deleted from it.
• Clean runs one scan and sorts what it finds into three groups. Safe to clean holds user caches, browser caches, the Trash, system logs, Xcode data and package manager caches. Review before cleaning holds large files, downloads older than 90 days, duplicate downloads and mail attachments. Handle with care holds iOS backups and Docker data.
• Large Files lists files above a size you set, biggest first.
• Apps uninstalls an app together with its related files and finds leftovers of apps you removed earlier.

Everything you choose is moved to the Trash after you confirm, and the space is freed when the Trash is emptied. The app offers to empty it once a clean is done.

The free version scans everything and cleans user caches, browser caches and the Trash. Pro is a single purchase with no subscription, and it unlocks the other categories.

Where to go next

Start with Step 1 and stop as soon as you have the room you need. If you would rather see the whole disk at once, download MacPrune and run a scan, or see what Pro adds on the pricing page. If the numbers still do not add up afterwards, read Mac storage full but nothing to delete.