Free up Disk Space on Mac without Using Software

Entry-level Mac laptops usually come with SSDs in small volume. For example, My MacBook Pro only has a 128 SSD. Problem arises as time passes by. More apps, files and junks are accumulated on your Mac, resulting in low performance. So it is a crucial task to clean up your Mac and free up more disk space on it in order to let it run more smoothly and faster.

You might see a lot of folks suggesting Mac cleaning software to get it done when you are trying to get answer from search engine. Indeed, those software are helpful but most of them are not free. And it is not easy to delete those apps after it is installed on your Mac. Actually, there is no need to install additional software to free up disk space on Mac as there is a stock utility that comes with modern macOS, such as Mojave, Catalina and Big Sur.

First, move your mouse to the left upper corner and click About this Mac.

Navigate to Storage tab and you will see brief information about the free up left on your Mac. Then, click Manage to see full details.

From new window, eight categories are displayed on the left sidebar, indicating how much space each one consumes. It also shows a few recommendations such as storing files in iCloud, optimizing storages by removing movies and TV shows, emptying trash can automatically and reducing clutter.

From the above screenshot, you can see that applications and documents are the two items that occupy most of my disk space. Now, click each item and delete unwanted apps and large files, clean up download folder and empty trash can.

Notice: It is unable to delete any file from System and Other category, which are grayed out by default.

You will get tons of free space by deleting unused apps or document files. Most importantly, no software or app is required during this procedure.

For most of cases, this is enough to clean up disk space on your Mac. However, this process does not delete junk files, cache files and data files generated by apps and operating system.

If you are doing the best by following above tutorial and it is still not enough, then it is recommended to use Mac cleaning software to get more free space by removing junk files, leftover files, system cache, logs files and language files from hard drive. Here is an example of TunesBro CleanGeeker, an effective data cleaning app that I have been using for years.

I will get an extra of 6.85 GB free space by deleting the junk files, mostly are generated by browser caches as you can see from the screenshot. These junk files can be deleted by one-click, which is super awesome.

Another potential solution is replacing the old drive with a new one that has large storage, say 1 TB or more. 128-GB or 256-GB SSD are really not enough for daily tasks if you are a developer, designer or video editor.