10 tips that will help free up disk space on OS X

Volumes of disk drives is constantly growing, but together with them and grow volumes of content with which we work. Music, movies, TV shows (!), And everything else good well "eat off" a place on the system partition of our Macs. Each of us, sooner or later, there was a situation when running out of disk space. Especially heavy MacBook account holders with a small amount of SSD. How to deal with it? In this article I will tell you 10 tips that will help you clean up disk space.

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Basket

Look for the icon of the Recycle Bin in your dock, it is full over the edge? Most likely, you've been it has not been cleaned. It's time to do it! Just open the menu, right click on it and select Empty trash. Many will say that this is commonplace, but you will be surprised to know how many people do not do it.

restart

Many OS X users leave the app running for a long time and almost never close them completely. This is bad because most applications (Safari, Chrome, Photoshop and many others) create temporary cache files, they work with. This cache continues to grow until you exit the application or restart it. In most cases, this will remove the existing cache and create a new one, which will be removed at the next startup, respectively. Browsers are very voracious.

Cleanup Downloads

Almost all of the files you upload are in the Downloads folder forever. Most OS X users to download files, use it, then left it lying there dead load. Over time, files stored in the Download for the accumulate, taking up precious hard disk space. Unfortunately, some of the files is necessary, but if you do not have time to conduct a full audit, and delete anything that you no longer need - remove even the largest files. Open the Downloads folder and choose to sort by size, remove any large files that you no longer need.

Down with flash

Even if you have not ventured into bringing order to the Downloads folder, delete from it, at least, all the annoying updates AdobeFlashPlayerInstaller. Flash - is evil (even better would be to completely remove it from the system).

reboot

Many of us do not reboot your Mac in a few days, or even weeks. It's certainly nice (especially to show off to Windows users), however, the system during operation creates a large number of temporary "garbage":

• system cache;
• cache applications;
• virtual memory swap files-;
• swap files-sleep;
• another;

All of this continues to grow and occupy more and more space on your hard drive. But if you restart your Mac, this place is busy. There is nothing to be ashamed of, so from time to time do not forget to reboot the system.

updating

I need not remind you of the importance of installing updates. But if you're still not sure, here's one more argument in favor of that - downloaded, but unspecified updates take up disk space. Yes it is. Install the update, restart your Mac and you will notice that the free space on the disk will increase.

Identification of large files

You can have folders with large files, which you simply forgot or did not know. Search for them manually is a thankless task, it is better to use special tools, eg Clean My Mac. In this application, there is a separate large file search function, with which you can scan your entire drive and identify the largest file size. Another advantage of this approach is that you can remove yourself some important system file, the utility will not allow you to do so and will only safe to remove the files. Also, using the Clean My Mac can be found for a long time non-opening old files and remove all this junk.

apps

Have a large number of unwanted and unused applications with a limited amount of disk - it is a luxury. You can delete them yourself from the program in the Finder folder, and you can take advantage of the Clean My Mac. The second option is even preferable, as this will remove not only Applications folder, but all associated files and folders that are stored in other directories.

SD-version films

iTunes is not perfect. If you love music and movies, this is the most important application for you, but it is not without its drawbacks. One of them is the storage of both versions of films (SD- and HD-quality). This is done for universality, but most likely, the SD-version you absolutely nowhere, and you see only HD. But even if it does not, you can choose one of them for himself, removing the second. This is done quite simply. All movies are stored in a folder ~ / Music / iTunes Media / Movies. You just open the folder with every film and remove it from the SD-version (it will be different characteristic of a smaller size). If desired, this process can be several automated.

duplicates

Photos and videos take up a lot of disk space, but if there are duplicates of some files - they will occupy even more space. Manually, you will not find them, it's almost impossible, but with the help of special tools - easily. We will help application Gemini. It costs money, but there is also a demo version, which is regularly looking for duplicates. Suffice it to wait until the application will scan your hard drive and displays the results, then you can only view them and delete unnecessary files.

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We have questions, comments or suggestions? Welcome to the comments - I'm always happy to talk and help. Stay tuned, there is still a lot of interesting things!