As technology progresses files on our computers become larger and larger. We take more pictures with our smartphones than we ever have before. The wonder of having larger files generally means we are seeing, reading, and creating documents in the highest quality available to us. Another wonder of progressing times is new advances in how we store these beautiful and high quality files. Over the last few years, Apple and other companies have introduced a new hard drive called a Solid State Drive. It’s much smaller and more durable than the clunky spinning disks that we’ve used for some time now. All of this information leads us to a little bit of a transitional time because these drives have started with low storage capacity.
Low storage capacity plus a growing number of large files equals even bigger problems with not having enough room for all of it on the brand new computer you just purchased!
There are lots of cloud storage solutions to problems like this but can be inconvenient at times when there is no internet access. Also, the prices of Solid State Drives are decreasing at a decent rate and should continue in this trend. In the mean time, there might just be some junk files that can be deleted. I have tested 3 or 4 apps on my mac to see which one was easiest to follow and delete information and will list my favorite then a secondary just in case.
**DISCLAIMER – Please be very careful when you are deleting files that aren’t familiar to you. Deleting system files can be harmful to your computer**
DaisyDisk (My favorite of the two)
DaisyDisk scans your hard drive and breaks down everything in a aesthetically pleasing interactive graph as well as a listed version as well.
Step 1: Click “Scan” on the Drive or Folder that you would like it to scan. I suggest you do “Macintosh HD” to see the entire breakdown or your internal hard drive.
After it completes the scan, you will see as diagram similar to this:
Step 2: At this point, you can click on each folder and have it clearly list how large certain files are that you can delete. The files that will generally take up the most space are in your user folder that contains downloads, documents, movies, etc.
Hopefully you’ll be able to go in and clear up just enough or more space than you need to function!
The program that came in a close second was Disk Inventory X
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