Clean up a Cluttered Hard Drive With the New MacOS Sierra Storage Manager
One of the handy new features in macOS Sierra takes care of something you probably don’t think much about: cluttered files filling up your hard drive. There is now a built-in utility that replaces these third-party tools and makes it easier to find space-consuming files, old apps, and more.
Find and open a new storage management tool.
The storage management tool is technically an app, but you won’t find it in the apps folder. There are two ways to get to it. You can open it by searching for “Manage Storage” in Spotlight (press Command + Space and type) or click the Apple logo> About This Mac. On this screen select the “Storage” tab and click “Manage”.
The recommendations page provides basic information
The first tab you see when you open Storage Management is the Recommendations tab. It gives you an easy overview of quick ways to free up storage space. Most of them are automated, so if you don’t like the idea of giving up control over which files are deleted and when, you shouldn’t fiddle with them, but these are quick fixes that can free up a lot of space. Here’s how each of the four options works:
- Store in iCloud : This moves files between your Mac and iCloud and back based on your usage. This means that it only stores recently opened files on your hard drive when you run out of storage, which sounds great in theory, but can be problematic if you’re the type of person who needs access to older documents. If you really don’t need space on your computer, it’s probably best to skip this option.
- Storage Optimization : This saves space by automatically deleting files that you probably no longer need. This includes deleting any iTunes movies or shows you’ve already watched, or removing large email attachments.
- Automatic Trash Empty : If you’re the type of person who never empties the trash, this will do it for you with 30-day old items.
- Reduce the clutter : Clicking the View Files button here will simply take you to the Documents tab, which we’ll cover below.
A recommendation starting point is helpful, but not enough to free up that much hard drive space. You will need a little manual control to do this.
Use each tab to find and delete large, old or unnecessary files
While Sierra’s automatic settings are handy, they’re actually not that useful for cleaning up space right now. Fortunately, the rest of the tools presented here can do just that. Let’s take a look at each one to see what you can safely delete in each section.
- Docs : This tab is your main bread and butter. It sorts large files, directs you to the downloads folder, and includes a more general file browser that shows the file size of each folder. This section is the easiest way to find large files to quickly clean up storage. When hovering over a file, press the X to immediately delete it, or the magnifying glass to display it in the Finder.
- iBooks : Given the size of eBooks, this tab doesn’t make much sense, but you can view all the files you’ve saved to iBooks here. If you’ve downloaded a lot of PDFs, you can clear some storage here, but you can ignore this tab otherwise.
- iCloud Drive : This simply links you to the “Store in iCloud” option above.
- IOS files : There’s a good chance you can quickly clear up a lot of storage space by deleting old iOS backups and installers. If you don’t need to keep old backups, delete them. You can also uninstall any old installers.
- iTunes: As the name suggests, this is your iTunes folder. While you may want to keep your music, you can delete old movies, TV shows, and podcasts quite easily here.
- Mail: If you use Apple Mail, it can waste a ton of disk space in a couple of years as it saves all your attachments and images. If it takes up a lot of space, you will see the option to only save recent emails and attachments here. Otherwise, this section is empty.
- Photos . If you use iCloud Photo Library, you have long had the option to only include “optimized photos” on your Mac. Basically, this means that you will only store low-res versions. You can always download the high-res version from iCloud, so if you have a ton of photos stored in your iCloud Photo Library but your Mac is running low on storage space, enabling this option is a good way to keep those photos accessible. without wasting too much space.
- Shopping Cart: As the name suggests, this is your shopping cart. You can safely clear it if you have a lot of files stored there.
The Storage Management app is great for professionals looking to seriously free up space, but for most people, it’s certainly enough. While we’re not sure about most of the automated solutions included here, sorting files manually should be enough for most people to quickly free up storage space when needed.