Mac storage full? A calm checklist
Short answer: empty the Trash, clear out Downloads, and turn on Storage settings’ recommendations. Then find the biggest folders with a disk map or Terminal and deal with them one at a time. Move things to the Trash rather than deleting them, and back up anything you’re unsure about.
If your Mac is almost full right now
- Empty the Trash. Items in the Trash still use space. Check it first, then choose Finder → Empty Trash.
- Sort Downloads by size. Open Downloads in list view and sort by Size. Old installers (
.dmg,.pkg,.zip) are usually safe to remove once installed. - Check Storage settings’ recommendations. In System Settings → General → Storage, options such as Optimize Storage and Empty Trash Automatically free space with little effort.
- Find the biggest folders. Scan with a disk map to see what’s large at a glance, or use the Terminal commands in this guide.
- Move big media you want to keep to an external drive or cloud storage, then check it’s there before removing the original.
- Restart. It lets macOS clear temporary files and virtual memory.
See exactly what’s using your space
DiskTree is free to download and explore. For Apple silicon Macs, macOS 11 or later.
How much free space should a Mac have?
macOS needs free space for updates, virtual memory, caches and snapshots, and it behaves better with room to spare. Apple doesn’t give one number. A common rule of thumb is to keep at least 10–15% of the disk free, and more before a major macOS update.
“Storage full”, but nothing big to delete?
- System Data is huge. It’s a catch-all category; most of it lives in your Library. See what’s in System Data.
- Local snapshots. Time Machine keeps local snapshots while there’s room. List them with
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /; macOS removes them when space is needed. - Purgeable space. Finder may count purgeable files, which macOS can remove on demand, as available. Storage settings may not. That’s why the two can disagree.
- Other user accounts. Files belonging to other users, or to deleted users, sit in
/Users. - Developer tools. Xcode, simulators, Docker and package caches can quietly take tens of gigabytes. See the developer guide.
Stay safe while you clean up
- Don’t delete anything in
/System,/Libraryor/private. - Removing items from iCloud Drive, Dropbox or other synced folders can remove them on your other devices too.
- Prefer the Trash to permanent deletion, so you can undo a mistake.
- Back up before removing anything you can’t identify.