If you find a folder that is taking up too much space and has stuff you don’t mind losing, right-click on it and choose Show in Finder. Click on the center of the circle to go up one level in the folder tree or click on the folder names in the toolbar above. Click on a colored section to see what’s inside it in another pie chart. Hover over the pie chart’s sections to see how much space that folder is taking up in the list on the right.

Give it time to scan the drive and then the app visually displays the drive’s storage allotment using an interactive pie chart. Launch DaisyDisk and click on the Scan button next to your Hard Drive. See what’s cluttering up a Mac hard drive using DaisyDisk.

You can get it in the Mac App Store for $9.99 or get a more robust version at the app developer’s web site where you can also download a trial version. Now that we’ve cleared out the Trash folder, it’s time to find out what’s eating up the hard drive or SSD space using a nice utility called DaisyDisk. We’ve got a few useful utilities that will help you clean up your MacBook hard drive. How to Clean Up Your MacBook Hard Drive Further However, there’s other junk on the hard drive to remove. If that’s enough space, then you’re finished. Follow the steps in the section above to show how much free space the hard drive has available. Now let’s see how much space we cleared up. Click on Empty Trash and the OS permanently removes the files. Keyboard shortcut fans can use the keyboard shortcut COMMAND + SHIFT + DELETE. Take a look at what’s there to make sure there’s nothing important accidentally sent to the Trash.įrom inside Finder click on the Finder menu from the upper left corner and choose Empty Trash. Click on the Trash can icon on the Dock at the right end. Take Out the Trashįirst, empty your OS X Trash. That lets you know how much space is free for storing files and apps. The Status Bar should say something like “42.93 GB available” (see screen shot above).

If it’s not showing, show it by clicking on View in the menu and then choose Show Status Bar or use the keyboard shortcut COMMAND+/. Or right-click it and choose Get Info from the pop up menu.Īt the bottom of the screen, if Finder shows the Status Bar, you’ll see some text.

Click on your computer’s main storage device, usually named Macintosh HD. To see if you need to clean up your MacBook hard drive, open Finder and click on your MacBook from the DEVICES section in the left hand Sidebar (see first arrow in screen shot below). Our How To Set Up Time Machine for Your Mac will explain the simple process for setting up and using Time Machine if you haven’t already started it. Is your MacBook hard drive getting full? We’ll show you how to clean up your MacBook hard drive or SSD using some built-in Mac tools or a couple of nice paid and free utilities.īefore jumping in, back up your drive. Use Apple’s Time Machine for the simplest and safest backup.

How to clean up mac book pro hard drive