Free Up Space On Mac Startup Disk

Mar 13, 2018 Hard drives are getting larger and larger, but somehow they always seem to fill up. This is even more true if you’re using a solid-state drive (SSD), which offers much less hard drive space than traditional mechanical hard drives. RELATED: 10 Ways To Free Up Disk Space on Your Mac Hard Drive. If you’re hurting for hard drive space, these. How to check a Mac’s free hard drive space. You also get a simplified overview of what sort of files are eating up your storage space. The Mac’s About box is the easiest way to see. Feb 11, 2017 Support Communities / Mac OS & System Software / macOS Sierra. In a nutshell: When I go to 'About This Mac Storage' the System files were taking up a whopping 90+ GB of my hard drive. Here is a screen shot. Finally, my macbook has free space again. Thank you so much!

Ways to free up disk space on a Mac. Before we show you how to clear disk space on your Mac, a word of caution is in order. Hard drive cleaning requires time and, in some cases, expertise. So, when in doubt, use a professional cleaning app. Now, let’s make some room for the files that truly deserve space on your Mac.

Jul 21, 2012 I have the extract same issue. MacBook Pro with a 500gb internal drive. I have 17gb free space I spent the afternoon moving project and files to an external 1tb drive. My external show I have now used 200+gb of space and I only free up 6gb on my internal drive. Oh I am an IT tech I know the difference between move and copy.

How to check the free space on your startup disk. Even if your Mac hasn’t warned you that the startup disk is almost full, you should regularly check how much free space you’ve got left so you can fix any problems as they develop. Here’s the easiest way to check the free space on your Mac: Click the Apple logo in the top-left corner of. Go to Startup Disk and select your Mac’s hard drive, which is usually called ‘Macintosh HD.’. Click Restart and wait for your Mac to reboot. It should boot up normally, breaking you out of the macOS update loop. Now you can follow these tips to free up enough space for the macOS update.

Free Up Space On C Drive

Summary :

Many computer users find that the hard drive is filled up and they may wonder what is taking up space on the hard drive and how to clean up the hard drive. This article will solve these problems.

What Is Taking up Space on My Hard Drive

Many computer users may find that their hard drives are filled up without reasons after the computer is used for a while. And at last, low disk space error may come up (especially partition C). This problem will affect computer performance. For example: apps or files can't be downloaded, the computer gives no response to your command or it gives a delayed response.

Then, what cause this problem? Or what is taking up space on my hard drive? Many users may ask problems like these. Usually, the hard drive space is occupied by system files, installed apps or personal files, backups, virus or other malware, or other unknown files.

How to Check the Hard Drive Space

How can we know what files take up the hard drive space most? Here is a tutorial for how to see what's taking up space on a hard drive on Windows 10.

Step 1: Press Start button, and then navigate to Settings>System >Storage.

Step 2: Click a disk and then its storage usage will be displayed.

Click What Is Taking up Space on Win10 for more methods.

In general, computer users could check the hard drive space first, and then they can solve the low disk space problem according to the actual storage usage in their computers.

As for how to free up disk space, the following two categories of methods are suggested. And the method with MiniTool Partition Wizard is strongly recommended because it's versed in managing disk space and the ways provided by it can solve the problem radically.

How to Free up Disk Space on Windows

1. Free up Space with Disk Cleanup

Many computer users like to run Disk Cleanup to free up disk space. This is a common way for most of computer users. Right click the disk you want to clean up, and then navigate to Properties>Disk Cleanup. Then check the files you want to delete and click OK to carry out.

However, some users may find that it can't solve the problem fundamentally. Disk cleanup can't relieve the problem at all. Or it relieves slightly but the low disk space problem persists and it relapses after a while.

2. Deal with Personal Files to Free up Disk Space

If there are lots of personal files in hard drive, users can delete the unnecessary files to clean up hard drive. As for the important files, users can transfer them to another hard drive. Or, users can store files like music, movies, photos, etc. on external storage or in the cloud.

In a word, users could delete or transfer all files to another place except the files that must be stored in this disk. (Actually, this method not only can free up disk space, but also can help you to manage or optimize the disk space.)

3. Delete Backups and Reduce Space Used for System Restore

If users have habit of making backups, they could delete the backups to free up disk space. At the same time, system restore points can be automatically created when users install a new app or update and they take up a lot of hard drive space.

So, users can delete the restore points or reduce the hard drive space used for system restore to free up disk space.

Here is a tutorial for deleting restore points and reducing space used for system restore.

Step 1: Open Administrator and right click This PC,and then click Properties from the drop-down menu.

Step 2: Click System protection from the pop-up window to make System Properties window pop up. And then click Configure button.

Step 3: Drag the block to adjust the max space usage for system restore points. Surely, there will be less restore points for system restore if you do so. Or, you can delete all restore points and disable system protection to free up disk space. But if you do so, there is no restore points for system restore.

4. Uninstall Programs

Surely, most of the time, it is programs and games that take upmost of the hard drive space. So, users also can uninstall apps or games that they no longer need to solve this problem. Press Start button and navigate to Settings>Apps>Apps & features to uninstall programs.

5. Run Antivirus Program

Sometimes, a virus or other malware may consume a lot of hard drive space. If you suspect the low disk space is cause by a virus, you can use an antivirus program like Windows Defender to run a virus scan and cleanup.

However, most of the time, the low disk space is not caused by a virus, and running Disk Cleanup or deleting personal files can't solve this problem. Although uninstalling apps can relieve the problem slightly, many users wouldn't like to adopt this method because most programs on the computer are useful and necessary for them.

To solve this problem radically, MiniTool Partition Wizard,professional partition management software, is recommended, which is versed in dealing with problems like this. And it provides you three solutions to clean up hard drive.

The first solution is Space Analyzer, which is similar to the above methods. But it is easier for users to operate. The second and third solutions are extending partition and upgrading to a larger hard drive, respectively. Only the last two methods can radically solve the problem.

Free up Disk Space with MiniTool Partition Wizard

MiniTool Partition Wizard provides 3 solutions to clean hard drive and you can choose one according to your need.

1. Space Analyzer Feature

This feature is free for computer users. What you need to do is to download the MiniTool Partition Wizard and follow the following guide.

Step 1: Download MiniTool Partition Wizard and launch it to get its main interface. And then click Space Analyzer on the toolbar.

Step 2: Select the partition that you want to clean up to scan.

Free Up Space On Mac Startup Disk
Warning: If you want to clean up local disk C, you should pay attention to system files (.sys files). These files are related to the operating system. If you delete them mistakenly, the operating system probably doesn't work well.

Step 3: Choose a file in Tree View, File View, or Folder View to delete.

Mac cd ripper software amplifier. Attention:

  • The Space Analyzer feature can also help you to check hard drive space. The files are listed from top to bottom according to the percentages that they take up in hard drive.
  • The result can also show you the hidden files and you can delete the files (even the hidden files) that you don’t want.
  • You could explore the selected file before you delete it to avoid deleting important files mistakenly.
  • Click here to obtain file attributes, which can help you to decide whether the files can be deleted.

Compared with the above methods, this solution does actually free up disk space to a certain extent. However, it also can’t help you a lot if all the files in the partition are important for you. So, you need to think of the following two solutions.

Space

2. Extend Partition

If your hard disk has unused space, you can use Extend feature of MiniTool Partition Wizard to extend the disk space of partition to increase the real disk space. The reason why the extend feature of Disk Management is not recommended is that it has many limitations. Click Why Extend Volume Grayed out for more information.

Note: If you want to free up the disk space of system related partition, you need to use Bootable Media feature first and then to use Extend feature to avoid damage to system files. You should note that the Bootable Media feature is not free. The whole process is shown below.If you just want to free up space of data partition, please use the Free Edition and start from Step 5.

Free up disk space of data partitions (not including system partition):

Free up disk space of system related partition:

Step 1: Install MiniTool Partition Wizard and launch it to get its main interface. And then click Bootable Media on the toolbar.

Step 2: A media type selection window pops up, and then click WinPE-based media with MiniTool plug-in to get another window. And finally choose the media destination.

Attention:

  • ISO File: If the boot.iso file can't be burned into the USB flash drive or CD/DVD successfully, you could choose this option, and a boot.iso file is generated. And then you could burn this file to your USB flash drive later.Finally, you can use the drive containing the file to boot your computer.
  • USB Flash Drive (This option is recommended): If you have a USB flash drive, you could choose this one, and the boot.iso file will be burned into it directly.
  • CD/DVD Writer: If your computer supports recording on CD/DVD, you could choose this one, and the boot.iso file will be burned into it directly.

Step 3: Set the Firmware to make the computer boot from the disk containing the burned boot.iso file.

Enter firmware (The specific entry methods vary from computer model to computer model). And then,navigate to boot page with right arrow key and put Removable Devices (USB)or CD-ROM Drive in the first place of the boot sequence with 'plus' key.

Step 4: Boot the computer to get the following interface. And then wait a few seconds without any operation to get the main interface of Partition Wizard.

Step 5: When you get the main interface of MiniTool Partition Wizard, Right click the partition that you want to extend, and finally click Extend.

Step 6: A window for adding space pops up. Drag the light blue block to adjust the space size to be added. Finally click OK.

Step 6: Click Apply button on the toolbar to execute the pending operations.

This solution is recommended because it increases the real disk space. Surely, some users may ask what if there is no unused space in the hard disk.Then, you must consider buying a larger hard drive if this situation happens.

3. Buy a Larger Hard Drive for Disk Upgrade

If your hard disk runs out and all data stored in it is very important, you should consider buying a larger hard disk. And then you could migrate OS to the larger drive to make it the new boot disk. And if possible, you could still store data on the original hard drive. Click here for the specific steps of migrating OS from the old hard disk to the new hard disk.

Tip: If your computer is laptop computer, which can only be mounted with one hard drive, you should choose to copy all the partitions on the system disk to another hard disk.

What Is Taking up Space on My Hard Drive FAQ

How do you find out what's taking up space on Windows 10?

Step 1: Press Start button, and then navigate to Settings>System >Storage.

Step 2: Click a disk and then its storage usage will be displayed.

Or you can use MiniTool Partition Wizard to find large files taking up hard drive on Windows 10.

C drive keeps filling up because the following reasons:

  1. The C drive itself is very small.
  2. You have installed much software on this drive.
  3. The system is patched, and all patches are installed on C drive by default.
  4. Cache junk files are not cleared in time.
  1. Use Disk Cleanup.
  2. Uninstall programs you don't need.
  3. Use Space Analyzer of MiniTool Partition Wizard.

Your Voice

We really want to know whether these methods can solve your problem, so please leave a comment to let us know it. If these methods can't help you, please leave a comment to describe your problem in detail so that we can help you. You also can email to [email protected] for help. Expecting your good news.

You won’t regret cleaning pools of junk files from OS X El Capitan since cleaning Mac hard drive is a prolific activity and basic start of Mac optimization. However, if you look deeper into OS X El Capitan disk you will actually find difficult to identify between useful and junk files. Since looking and identifying junk files is confusing you might end up removing important files. This would be a sure short disaster, which is why you should be ensuring a complete updated backup of the Mac hard drive running OS X El Capitan. 10.11 or to reclaim Mac hard drive spaces, remove junk files, etc. try Mac cleaner software which is available free.

Free Up Disk Space Mac

Before you launch cleaning operation on Mac OS X El Capitan, right-click on the Time Machine icon from top – left of the menu bar and select BACK UP NOW. Wait for some-time so that Time Machine application performs full backup of your OS X El Capitan hard drive.

Now gather your strength and start Mac cleaning with.

Emptying Trash on OS X El Capitan

You know by pressing “Command + Shift + Option + Delete” keys, you can clean out all the files from the Trash without the use of mouse and its right click. This is helpful when you are sure that no important files exist to be resorted back from the trash. Otherwise manually take a tour of your trash folder so that you can restore important files back to their location and proceed with permanent deletion of files from the trash.

Which of the above trash looks cleaner and better on El Capitan? You decide.

Clean all unwanted files from Download folder

You might be busy in downloading the best Mac apps or videos for OS X El Capitan but did you remember to move all the used DMG and zip archive files to trash? Go to the Download folder and press-hold “Command + I” to get info of Download folder. No surprises, if you are surprised to check out the Size of the folder due to presence of unwanted files. Don’t spare a minute to send all of them to Trash and do empty it for free space collection.

Cleaning iTunes duplicate files

Music files can easily get duplicated in iTunes but don’t worry because iTunes can help you find them for removal. It’s very simple, see how: Launch iTunes << Click View << Click ShowDuplicateItems. The iTunes application will list up all the duplicate music files by name, artists or group items. To remove the duplicate files from the hard drive you first need to uncheck the original files and keep checked all the duplicate items. Now click on Edit from iTunes menu bar and click Delete. This is how to you says GOODBYE to duplicate files on iTunes using OS X El Capitan or below versions.

Let me share with you that there is an otherwise better solution to remove iTunes, iPhoto, iMovies, iWork and Aperture duplicate files by using Smart Finder application. Though small, it’s a helpful application that eliminates all kinds of duplicate files from OS X.

Cleans caches safely from El Capitan

There are pros and cons of removing old & news caches from Mac hard drive. The plus part is that your Mac OS X gets good amount of hard drive spaces by removal of large stockpile of caches. If your Mac hard drive is dying on free spaces, giving you hiccups or freezing at the best part of your OS X computing then you shall always go ahead to clean this culprit knows by the name – CACHES. Additionally, when your Mac hard drive have good amount of free spaces it will never ever disappoint you with the error message “Your startup disk is almost fullYou need to make more space available on your startup disk by deleting files.

My recommendation is to register Stellar Speedup Mac utility for cleaning out caches from the OS X El Capitan home folder. This tool reaches to the deeper location of the hard drive where mouse cursor may not reach. Run this tool now and you will clean all the junks (including logs, unwanted language files, binaries, extensions and system junks) from the hard drive. After the use of Stellar Speedup Mac software all you will be left with a better and faster OS X El Capitan.

Coming back to the minus part of deleting the caches is some of the OS X apps, mostly browsers may behave slower than before. But don’t worry since creation of new and fresh caches will soon fill up the void.

Uninstalling useless application

Mac hard drive cleaning is incomplete without uninstallation of unwanted freeware, shareware, widgets and plugins. Show your Mac OS X that you care for its cleanliness and remove all sorts of useless and unused software to a location they deserve the most i.e. TRASH. Let me also remind you again to empty the trash.

How To Clear Up Space On Mac Startup Disk

Backup Mac OS X and fresh install OS X

Some misery of slowness never ends which is why you should go for fresh installation of the OS X El Capitan. Though technical, but simple procedure of cleaning an old copy of sluggish and freezing Mac and replacing it with new one. This post best describes the clean installation of OS X El Capitan. Be prepared for an OS X performance evolution and leave me your thoughts.

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Contents

  • How to free up space on a Mac?
    • How to see the used Storage on a Mac?
    • How to Fix Mac Startup Disk Full with pCloud Drive?
      • Note: If you have very low disk storage you must do the following:
    • Example:

If you are a Mac user and you have a smaller HDD Macbook, chances are you have seen this message at least once: “Your startup disk is almost full” or you want to know how to free up space.


In this article, I will explain why this happens and how to never see this warning ever again!

How to free up space on a Mac?

Mac Startup Disk Full

What is a “Mac Startup Disk”?

Your Mac startup disk is a volume or a partition of a drive that contains a usable operating system. You can set your Mac to automatically use a specific startup volume, or you can temporarily override this choice at startup.

What this means is that the startup disk is the “home” of all the files needed for starting your Mac and using it.

Without a startup disk, you will not be able to switch on your computer.

Why is my Mac “Startup Disk Full”?

In short, you have too many files. When this happens, it slows down all processes on your computer – see, in order to complete some tasks, your computer needs space to store temporary files and system files. When this happens and you run low on storage, the operating system needs to decide whether it can delete some files in order to complete the task. Most of the time this is not possible and the computer crashes or becomes very, very slow.

It is recommended that a startup disk should never be at above 85% of its capacity in order to work properly.

How to see the used Storage on a Mac?

If you want to see the exact types of files that are using the storage on your Mac:

      • Click the Apple in the top-left corner

      • Click on “Storage”

Currently, I have 73.9 GB used and 425.2 GB Free.

Most of my used storage is from “Other”

What is “Other” in the Mac Storage?

According to Apple, in OS X El Capitan or earlier versions, “Other” files are those that your Mac doesn’t recognize as belonging to any other category. These include files within disk images or archives, data stored by apps such as Contacts or Calendar, and app plug-ins or extensions. When your Mac is running in Safe Mode, all files are categorized as Other.

How to Fix Mac Startup Disk Full with pCloud Drive?

What is pCloud Drive

pCloud Drive is a desktop application that creates a secure virtual drive on your computer, which you can use to easily store, access and work with your files in the cloud.

To add files and folders to your pCloud Drive, simply drag and drop* your data into your virtual drive. You can then be sure that they are safely stored in the cloud and synchronized on all of your devices.

*for this to work fast you need to have at least some free storage on your startup disk. If you don’t, keep reading!

pCloud Drive provides a number of additional functionalities, such as integrated file sharing and synchronization through your computer.

Note: If you have very low disk storage you must do the following:

      • Choose the folder you want to Sync with pCloud:
      • Click on the pCloud icon and choose Sync to pCloud:
      • Create a folder on pCloud Drive:
      • Wait for the Sync to be completed:
      • This is very Important! After the Sync is finished, you must stop it with the cross icon:
      • After you stopped the Sync you can delete the files you just synchronized:
      • You can go to pCloud Drive and see the files you synced and use them as if they are on your computer! (A green icon means everything is synced.)

The app significantly eases your work upon performing file operations in the cloud, because with pCloud Drive you can work with your files using any software on your computer.

What this means is that if I have a vacation video in pCloud Drive I can watch it with no problem with the default video player on my computer. In my case VLC Player.

The best thing is that since the video is in pCloud Drive it is not actually on my computer but it’s in the cloud and does not take ANY of my Startup Disk Space!

Another awesome thing is that I can watch this video also on my phone with the pCloud mobile apps OR if I’m using a different computer that does not have pCloud Drive, I can watch it via Chrome, Firefox or any other internet browser. I just need to go to my.pcloud.com and sign in. Here is what I see:

Same thing works for:

Documents – I can open and edit them with any text editor with pCloud Drive or access them from any of the other apps. The same works for worksheets, PDFs, presentations etc.

Photos – I can open them, see them or edit them with Photoshop or any other image editor.

Audio files – I can listen to them on my default music player or with pCloud mobile and web apps music player. I can even create playlists within pCloud.

How do i free up space on my mac startup disk

Every other type of file – As long as I have an app or a program to open the file with, there is no problem for pCloud Drive.

Nice right?!

What this means is that you can move all the files that are using your Mac Startup Disk Storage in pCloud Drive.

That way they WILL NOT use any of the space on your computer and you will still have access to them and use them with the apps installed.

Example:

I have a 512GB SSD Macbook Pro Retina. I also have a pCloud Premium account which is 500GB of storage. This makes my Macbook capable of storing 1TB worth of files.

Sharing with pCloud Drive

You can share any file or folder that you have in pCloud Drive.

You just right-click on the file or folder you want to share and choose if you want to invite someone to the folder or create a so called Download link.

Make Space On Startup Disk

This way you can collaborate with people or share the vacation photos and videos with your friends for example.

How To Free Disk Space On Mac

pCloud Speed

When you use pCloud Drive, you don’t even understand that your files are not stored locally. That’s because of the super high speed that we offer for uploading and downloading files. We compared our upload and download speed with the ones of Dropbox and here are the results for 1.12GB file:

pCloud Security

To guarantee your files’ safety, pCloud uses TLS/SSL encryption, applied when information is transferred from your device to the pCloud servers.

Your files are stored on at least three server locations in a highly secure data storage area.

Optionally, you can subscribe for pCloud Crypto and have your most important files encrypted and password protected. We provide the so-called client-side encryption, which, unlike server-side encryption, means that no one except you will have the keys for file decryption.

Conclusion

How Do I Free Up Space On My Mac Startup Disk

A lot of Mac users have the same frustrating problem. Startup Disk Storage fills up quickly on smaller versions (128GB and 256GB) and if you use it for work, you can fill up a 512GB Mac very fast too. Especially if you are a designer or a video editor for example, and work with large files. And even if you are not creating huge files, with the pace we are creating information is growing very fast:

Just think about this: smartphones and cameras that can shoot RAW files and in 4K, which means you’ll have photos and videos of amazing quality – but they will also take a lot of memory so the more space you have, the better.

pCloud Drive helps you virtually add storage to your Mac (or any PC for that matter). You can move your photos, videos, music, documents any other kinds of files there and use them as if they are on your device with the apps you are used to. Also, you can access them on a smartphone via the pCloud mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile, and in a web browser when you go to the website and sign in.

P.S.

If you never want to run out of storage on your iPhone too, read this.