Are you troubled with your clumsy Mac system? Is your clumsy Mac slowing down your work system? If yes, you may want to go through this article to get effective tips to clean your cluttered hard drive on Mac.
Although junk is generally unseen, it can take up a lot of room. Most of the room on your disk is occupied by temporary files, duplicate files, unnecessary attachments, system cookies, and cache. Hence, it is necessary to clean up all such accumulated trash timely, or else eventually you will end up with the error on your Mac “ Disk storage is almost full”.
You can either opt to clean your hard drive manually or you can use the best free Mac cleaner apps to clean your hard drive efficiently. Let us discuss here some of the easy and effective methods to clean hard drives and get ample storage space.
Quick & Easy Methods to Free Up Storage Space
Following are some of the ways to clean your hard drive.
Uninstall unwanted apps
It’s the human tendency to download the app when required and let it be on the system for a long time even if it’s no longer in use. This unwanted accumulation of apps will eventually lead to slowing down your Mac system. Hence, it is essential to uninstall the apps no longer in use and free up the space.
To uninstall apps on your Mac, choose the app by right-clicking on it and then select Move to Trash.
Though, simply removing the app won’t work effectively, so after moving it to the trash make sure you empty the trash can as well.
Delete old iOS backups
Backing up your files is an advisable good practice you should follow. But letting old backups which are no longer useful to you accumulate, can lead to high storage occupancy on your hard drive and leaves no space for new files to store. Hence, it is important to delete old unwanted iOS backups from your system. Every backup is accessible via iTunes on your computer.
Follow the below-given steps to delete the old backups.
- Go to the Apple menu and then choose About This Mac.
- Select the Storage tab and go to Manage.
- Now select iOS files
- Choose the backup files you want to delete and click on delete.
This will help in freeing up the majority of your storage space.
Delete cache files
Caches are the files in which your Mac stores a lot of information which allows you to access the data faster and easier as you need not to get it from the original source. But, such cache files take up a lot of storage room and make your Mac clumsy. Hence, to speed up your system work, it is necessary to delete all the cache files from your system timely.
Follow the given instructions to clear the cache.
- Go to Finder and select the “Go” folder.
- Type ~/Library/Caches and press enter.
- Now look into each folder and remove all the cache files.
Remove duplicates
Sometimes, your Mac stores unwanted duplicate files in your system while occupying unnecessary space. Hence, it is advisable to remove all the duplicate files and keep your system clean.
To remove duplicates, you need to follow these steps.
- Go to File and choose Smart Folder.
- On the top right corner, click “+”.
- Now select the parameters based on your requirement from the drop-down menu.
- If you want to select more than one parameter, click “+” for adding parameters.
- To remove any parameter, click “-” on the top right corner.
- Now all the files will appear in this Smart folder based on the parameters set.
- You can easily differentiate and select the duplicate files and move them to the trash.
Remove unwanted language files
Mac supports every language in its applications and stores language files for the same. Hence, it enables you to start using the app in the language you speak. But now, what about the languages you don’t use to access the app? Such files of such languages get unnecessarily stored on your device and occupy space. Hence, you need to remove such files timely to free up space.
To remove language files, follow the below steps.
- Go to Finder and click on Applications.
- Then right-click on the app from which you want to remove language files and then click on Show Package Contents.
- Now find folders ending with “.lproj.” in the resources folder and remove those files.
For every app, you need to follow the same instructions.
Remove old Disk Images
Sometimes, old and unwanted disk images also can occupy space and can slow down your Mac system. Hence, it becomes necessary to remove DMGs.
- To remove, go through below given easy steps.
- Go to Finder and type “.dmg” in the search bar.
- Now remove all files that have .dmg extensions and make sure to remove them from the Trash bin as well.
Empty Trash bin
Even after following all the above steps and deleting all the files, without emptying the trash bin, the declutter process is not very effective. Hence, it is important to make sure that your trash bin is empty.
To empty the trash bin, long-click on the trash icon and select Empty Trash.
Use cleaner apps
If you don’t want to clean your Mac hard drive manually through all the above steps, you can use the free Mac cleaner apps available and let them clean your hard drive for you.
There are many Mac cleaner apps available for you to download and use. Some of the effective cleaner apps are listed below.
- CleanMyMac
- CCleaner for Mac
- Clean up my system
- Disk Clean Pro
- Disk Doctor
- Drive Genius
- MacBooster 8
To clean your hard drive using the cleaner apps, download the app for free and run it on your device. Scan your hard drive through the app and get your system decluttered and free up storage space.
Conclusion
In this article, we have discussed all the effective ways of cleaning out the junk accumulated in your Mac hard drive and increasing the speed of your system handily. We have discussed the manual ways as well as the easy app cleaning method to help you with your storage problems and slow work pace issues. You may go through this article to get help with your Mac PC.
