How To Clean Up My Mac For Free

The free trial version scans your Mac as many times as you want and will clean up to 500 MB of data. If you want to keep the app and have it continue to flag and delete duplicates, you'll need to. Since we mostly use our Macs to go online, the internet-related junk takes up the most space. How to clean up your browser cache: For Safari, click Develop in the top menu. Then, click Empty caches. For Chrome, click the “hamburger” icon in the top right corner. Then click More tools Clear browsing data. Clean My Mac X is a paid (but not too expensive) app. I think the paid version of Clean My Mac is totally worth it. But if you’re looking for a free Mac clean up app, try the Clean My Mac free version. The free Clean My Mac X has limited functionality but is still useful. If you’re looking for even more bang for your buck, check out Setapp.

/PowerMyMac /How to Clear System Storage on Mac Effectively

Here are 12 free solutions on how to free up disk space on Mac. They are outlined below. Optimize Storage. This is the built-in feature from Mac OS Sierra. They added this feature with the aim of cleaning up your disk from time to time. You’ve probably heard “Remove your cache” as a web browser troubleshooting tip.

By this time, you might have been experiencing that you are a sort of running out of system storage on your Mac and you may be looking for ways on how to clear system storage on Mac. And one of the first thing that you would do is to check out your disk space for you to see what are the things that are eating up your Mac's system storage.

And once that you view system storage on Mac, you will then be surprised to see a yellow bar that refers to your System which is like occupying more of your space on your Mac, including so many purgeable files to delete. And the worst case is that you actually have no idea what are the things that are included in your system storage.

TIPS:

That is why in this post, we are going to show you how to clear system storage on Mac and what are the things that contain your system storage on your Mac so that you will have better knowledge on what are the things that you should be removed from your Mac.

Article GuidePart 1. What Dose System Storage Mean on Mac?Part 2. How Do I Free up System Storage on My Mac Automatically?Part 3. How to Clear System Storage on Mac Manually?Part 4. In Conclusion

Part 1. What Dose System Storage Mean on Mac?

What Is System Storage on Mac?

The files that actually your system storage of your Mac contains are all of those junks that you actually do not need on your Mac. This can be your System Cache, Application Cache, System Logs, User Logs, and more.

Why Is My Mac System Storage So Big?

Why is there so much system storage on my Mac? These files are stored on your Mac every time that you are making a download, or saving new files on your Mac. This can be your email attachments, iTunes movie, and more. Some of these files are saving large files that is why it can take up your system storage quickly.

Furthermore, Your 'System' and 'Library' folders are the main storage locations. Therefore, if your 'system' takes up a lot of space, Time Machine snapshots are most likely stored on your Mac.

Now you know what is system storage, but how to clear system storage on Mac so that you can free up more space to save other files you desired? macOS comes with a feature to optimize your storage: turn to “About this Mac” > choose Storage > click Manage button, then you will see Store in iCloud, Optimize Storage, Empty Trash Automatically, and Reduce Clutter. You can make use of these options to reduce the system storage on your Mac first.

Part 2. How Do I Free up System Storage on My Mac Automatically?

There are methods to clean Mac system storage manually we will talk about in the next part, but they surely take more time and effort as you will be needing to go through your Mac one by one.

However, there is a better way for you to free up system storage Mac. You will be able to clear your Mac’s system storage in no time.

All the methods on how to clear system storage on Mac that we have included in the next part can all be done just by one program – the iMyMac PowerMyMac. This program is considered to be a Mac system storage cleanup tool that you can use to reduce system storage on Mac by removing all junk files.

Using the PowerMyMac will allow you to choose all the junks or files that you no longer need on your Mac and clean them. You can decide what to remove or not, so you will be assured that none of your important files will be deleted without you knowing it. Then how to get rid of system storage on Mac with PowerMyMac?

Here is how to clear system storage on Mac with PowerMyMac.

Download and install PowerMyMac on your Mac, then launch it.
Launch the iMyMac Program
Select the Master Scan module to clear your Mac’s system storage by deleting System Cache, Application Cache, System Logs, User Logs, etc.
After scanning, mark all the files that you would want to clean and click on the “Clean” button.

So there you have the easy way on how to clear system storage on Mac with just a few clicks using PowerMyMac. You can also try the other options that the program has to clean up other things like duplicate photos on your Mac. This will then boost the performance of your Mac and at the same time, you will be able to gain more of your system storage back.

Part 3. How to Clear System Storage on Mac Manually?

Method #1. Delete Time Machine Backups

Not only will Time Machine backups be stored on an external drive, but macOS will also keep a backup copy on your startup drive so that you can restore files when the external drive is unavailable. You may need to delete your Time Machine backups when your Mac is run out of system storage. Check the steps below:

Launch Terminal and type this command: tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates
Press the Return button then you will see a list of Time Machine backups listed by date.
Type the command: tmutil deletelocalsnapshots NAME (NAME is the name of one of the listed backups).
Press the Return button again.
You can repeat step 3 and step 4 to remove those backups you'd like to clear out.

Method #2. Clean Up Your Mac's Cache

Caches are one of the biggest culprits as to why your Mac’s system storage is getting full. So for you to know how to delete system storage on Mac, go ahead and clean up your Mac’s cache:

Launch Finder on your Mac.
Then go ahead and click on “Go to folder”.
From there, go ahead and type in ~/Library/Caches then remove all the files that are taking up most space.
After that, go ahead and click on “Go to folder”.
Then type in /Library/Cache and then once more, go ahead and remove all the files that are taking up most space.

Method #3. Remove Your Old iTunes Library Backups

Whenever you make a backup on your iTunes, the more backup file is stored on your Mac. And with that, these backups that you no longer use will be piled up on your Mac and this can cause your system storage to get full as well.

So, for you to remove system storage on Mac, go ahead and remove all those old iTunes Backup that you no longer need:

Go ahead and launch Finder on your Mac.
Then go ahead and click on the “Go” button located at the menu bar.
Then choose “Go to Folder”.
Then go ahead and enter the following: ~/Music/iTunes/Previous iTunes Libraries
Once done, you will be able to see all of your iTunes back-ups. The date they were made is also indicated so you can go ahead and choose your old backups and delete them.

Method #4. Take Out All Unused Applications

This method is one of the most common ways on how to clear system storage on Mac. All you have to do is to go through all of the applications that you have on your Mac and sort out which are the ones that you no longer use and uninstall them. You just have to make sure that you are removing them correctly and not just by merely dragging them over to your Trash bin.

You have to make sure that when you uninstall any application on your Mac that you no longer need, you should also find all the files or folders that are associated with that application. If not, then you are still leaving data behind and that will still eat up space on your Mac.

Method #5. Clean Up Your Photo Library

How To Clean Up My Macbook Air For Free

Photos are one of the most common data that we have on our Mac. And keeping them is keeping memories. However, these photos actually take up more space on your Mac’s system storage. So you have to make sure that you sort things out.

So how to clear space on Mac system? You can delete all the photos that you think you no longer need and as well as those photos that have more than one copy. You also have the option to transfer them over to another hard drive or USB drive for you to free up space on your Mac.

Method #6. Delete Any Old iOS Backup

How To Clean Up My Macbook For Free

Just like your iTunes backup, the old iOS backup that you have on your Mac is also one of the reasons as to why your Mac’s system storage is getting full. That is why it is a good idea that you should also remove your old iOS backup from your Mac. Let's check the steps on how to clear system storage on Mac below:

Go ahead and launch Finder on your Mac.
After that, go ahead and click on the “Go” button located at the menu bar.
From there, go ahead and choose “Go to folder”.
Then once that you are in, go ahead and type the following: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

Once that you have opened the window, go ahead and choose all the old iOS backup that you have on your Mac. Dates of the backup are already indicated so that you will be able to know which of them are the old ones.

Part 4. In Conclusion

As you can see, it is an easy thing to do on how to clear system storage on Mac. Though doing this manually will take more time and effort. But all thanks to the PowerMyMac, you will be saving more of your time and effort as it will only need a few clicks to do the cleaning process and optimize system storage.

Make it a habit of cleaning up your Mac every now and then so that you will not be able to experience having full storage and a slow Mac. Remember, cleaning up all the files and other things that you no longer need will sure be a great help for the performance of your Mac.

Waves tune plugin crack. Last Tip: If you want to reduce the “system” storage size on your iPhone or iPad, just turn to the provided link to check how to free up system storage on iPhone.

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How to clean your Mac automatically

Here’s a simple diagram to explain the most common types of computer junk, sorted by size. Some of these, like Trash bin files, are easily reachable, while others are stored away in hidden system folders. Sadly, there’s no easy way to clear them up without special skills.

If you don’t feel like spending the next several hours cleaning your Mac manually, you can use a powerful cleaning tool CleanMyMac X to find and remove all the clutter your Mac contains. It knows which files are useless, how to find and remove them completely. CleanMyMac X has everything to finish the 3-hour task of a Mac cleanup in under 5 minutes. It will even clean up the junk you didn’t know about and give your computer a speed boost.

How to clean up system storage on Mac with CleanMyMac X:

Download CleanMyMac X for free here.
Run the app and go to System Junk.
Click Scan.
Press Clean to get rid of all junk.

Done! Now your Mac looks much better!

How to Clean Mac Hard Drive Manually

If you never performed an automatic or manual system cleaning — it means that your Mac has been collecting unnecessary files and clutter for years. You can quickly clean up your Mac with these easy steps.

1. Clean up cache

You’ve probably heard “Remove your cache” as a web browser troubleshooting tip. In fact, your Mac stores a lot of information in files called caches, allowing fast access to that data and reducing the need to get it from the original source again. Unfortunately, those files take a lot of space on your Mac, and instead of speeding things up, they slow your computer down. Therefore, if you want to give your system a boost, clean your Mac from the cache files.

There are two ways to do that: you can delete them manually or use a MacBook cleaner like CleanMyMac X to do the job for you. Of course, the second way is an easy and fast one. However, if you decide to clean up the cache manually, check out a comprehensive guide on “How to Clear Cache on a Mac.”

2. Uninstall apps you don’t use

The applications you’ve installed on your Mac take up space, of course. And over time when your Mac becomes full of different apps, it may start running slowly. How to clean MacBook? In the first place, you need to remove the apps you no longer use or need. To do this, right-click on the app you want to remove and choose Move to Bin.

You may be surprised to find out that sending an app to the Trash will not uninstall it completely because the app leftovers still remain on your Mac taking up a lot of storage. So, if you want to be a responsible Mac user, you need to uninstall applications the right way. Here’s a step-by-step guide on “How to Uninstall Apps on a Mac.”

Extra step: Trim down your login items

Login items are applications that run automatically upon startup. Nowadays, every second app tries to become as prominent as possible and get into your Login Items. First of all, you may not even know what they are (not all of them appear in the Dock). Secondly, such apps consume memory. That's enough reason to get rid of extra login items you don't need.

Open System Preferences.
Go to Users & Groups.
Choose your nickname on the left.
Choose the Login Items tab.
Check startup programs you want to remove.
Press the “–” sign below.

You’re done.

3. Clean out useless duplicates

Identical photos, music tracks you’ve added one time too many, saved and re-saved PDF files… all of that sits on your Mac and gobbles up storage. The storage that could be used for better purposes.

So how do you quickly weed them out? The fastest way is to use Gemini 2: The Duplicate Cleaner.

Download and launch the app
Click “Scan for Duplicates”, and watch as it quickly fetches them from different corners of your Mac.
Once the scan is done, hit Review Results and check which copies you want to remove.
Click Smart Cleanup to delete everything you’ve selected.

That's it. Now your Mac should be completely duplicate-free.

4. Empty the Trash

Even though you’ve deleted the files, they reside in your Trash bin taking up a lot of storage on your Mac. They are just waiting to be removed completely. If you want your precious hard drive space back, you need to empty the Trash.

Here’s how to clean your MacBook from the trash:

Click and hold on the Trash can icon in the Dock.
Click Empty and then Empty Trash.

The process is quite simple, right? There is even a more effortless way to clear Trash. CleanMyMac X scans your Mac for junk and lets you remove all trashed files. To do that, launch CleanMyMac X and press Scan. When the scan is completed, click Review Details to see what exactly CleanMyMac X has found.

I’ve already cleaned Bin a couple of weeks before, but over some time, almost a gigabyte of trashed files has accumulated. Now, I can simply click Back to Summary and then Run to clean Trash and system junk.

5. Reduce clutter

Apple has already thought about the clutter that can be generated on the Macs and provided a possible solution. Here’s how to reduce clutter on your Mac:

Go to the Apple menu.
Choose About This Mac and then Storage. Here you can see how much free space is left on your computer.
Then click Manage.

Here’re some recommendations for saving space on your Mac. You can choose Review Files to examine apps, documents, and other files that are stored on your Mac.

You can choose any file in every category (Applications, Bin, Documents, etc.) and click Delete to remove it and optimize space. Look through other recommendations and make the necessary changes to use your Mac’s space more efficiently.

6. Delete large and old files

It has always been a rule of thumb among computer geeks, that you should keep a minimum of 15-20% of free space on your main hard drive. This is just a rough estimation, but the more free space you have, the faster your Mac works. A computer magazine once performed a test on this, which concluded that the difference in speed can reach as much as 35%. If you work with heavy graphics or video rendering, even more free space is recommended.

How to have more free space? Delete large and old files.

The first way is totally manual and requires you to find them one by one, while for the second way, you just need to make two clicks and CleanMyMac X will do the job for you.

How to clean up Mac with CleanMyMac X:

Download CleanMyMac X (a link to a free edition of the app)
Launch the program.
Go to the Large and Old Files section on the menu.
Click Scan.
Review the details, select what to clean, and then click Clean.

That’s it!

7. Remove old iOS backups

Having your files backed up is a wonderful thing. But over time your Mac becomes overloaded with old backups that take gigabytes of storage on your hard drive. That’s why you should consider removing the old iOS backups you no longer need.

How To Clean Up Your Mac For Free

Each backup remains stored on your computer and is accessible via iTunes. To delete the old backups, you need to do the following:

Choose the Apple menu and then select About This Mac.
Go to the Storage tab and click Manage.
Here, choose iOS Files.
Select the backup you want to remove and click Delete.
Confirm and you’re done!

That’s it! The backup files are gone from your Mac forever.

8. Wipe out Language files

Unused language localizations take up about1 GB of storage space. Mac applications come with language files for every language they support. It allows starting using the app in that language immediately. Cool, right? Not always. Just consider: when was the last time you used the app in Bengali or Korean? Since you don’t speak those languages, such files just waste space on your Mac. You need to remove the unnecessary language files and clean MacBook from that clutter.

How to delete the language files? Go to Finder > Applications, then right-click the app which language files you want to remove and choose Show Package Contents. Open the Resources folder and then find folders ending with “.lproj.” Every folder contains language files for one particular language. Note that for every app you should manually find and select the files to remove. But there is an automatic way to delete the language files that will save you tons of time — CleanMyMac X. Just download the application (for free) and it will do the job for you.

9. Delete old DMGs

Disk images (DMGs) often take up valuable space on your Mac. Here’s how to perform a Mac cleanup and get rid of those files:

Open Finder and type “.dmg” in the search bar.
Then delete all files that have .dmg extensions. Don’t forget to remove them from Trash as well.

CleanMyMac X allows you to locate and delete DMGs quicker. With its System Junk module you can remove unused disk image with a single click of a button:

Just press Clean and it’s done!

10. Sort your Downloads folder

Do you also download things and never get rid of them? Then, your Downloads folder probably needs a good old sort out. If you’re too scared to face that enormous pile of files, here’s a quick trick: sort all your downloaded items by date added. Then, scroll till the end of the folder, and you’ll see the dusty files that have been there for a while. Command-click to highlight multiple files and send them to the Trash.

11. Tidy up your desktop

Many people use Desktop as their primary destination for files. But this could be tricky because your OS treats every file on a desktop as an active window. When items on your desktop are too many, Finder gets substantially slower. This leads us to the most compelling advice in this article — cleaning up desktop does miracles!

Rather than just leaving every file on your desktop, organize them into folders. The latest macOS does that automatically thanks to the Stacks feature: right-click your Desktop and choose Use Stacks. Now all your files are grouped and you can delete them with a click. You can also use Google Drive, Dropbox, or any external storage device to save your files and keep your desktop tidy.

12. Clean your Mac’s keyboard

Our last but not least advice is to wipe your Mac’s keyboard. As you use your keyboard daily, it quickly gets dirty. Moreover, all those crumbs may live under the keys forever!

If you were wondering how to clean Mac’s keyboard, there are no special rules here. You can try blowing the dust and other particles out of your keyboard once in a while. Disinfecting wipes and alcohol-based sprays may also prove useful. Just choose the piece of fabric and wipe the keys gently to make them clean and shiny!

All in all, be careful with your system files. Don’t delete things you’re not sure about. If you are not completely confident that you can manage the task by yourself, better use a dedicated utility like CleanMyMac X to get a fresh and clean Mac in just two clicks. Here's the video describing quick tips to clean up your Mac:

Happy cleaning!