How to check your storage space on your Mac Though your Other storage might have been spread out across categories in macOS Sierra and higher, you can still follow the below steps to manually clean up your Mac and get rid of unnecessary files. Purgeable files also include caches and temporary files that used to fit into the Other category, which will also be deleted as your hard drive starts to fill up. The Purgeable files are what Optimized Storage will move to iCloud and delete from your hard drive only if your hard drive starts to get full. Older documents are stored in iCloud, while a shortcut icon is kept on your Mac (files are automatically re-downloaded to your Mac as soon as you open them).

When you move your Documents into iCloud (part of the Store in iCloud component) and your hard drive gets low on storage, only recently opened files are kept on your Mac. This is part of Apple's Optimized Storage service. Likewise /Applications and ~/Downloads are common sources of data.If you check your system storage graph in macOS, you'll probably discover a category called Purgeable. The ~/Library folder for a given user is often quite large due to the email cache.

You can also use something like: du -h -d1 to only look at the current level, or -d3 to go 3 levels down instead. You can use “cd” to navigate to a different starting point, for example you might only be interested in what’s taking up all the space in your own ~/Documents folder. You will now see a list of every folder from the top of the disk and down 2 folder levels, with the size of each folder denoted in K,M,G or T (for kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes or terabytes).Įach folder will also show its total size calculated at the bottom of each section of results. This command runs a du (disk usage) command with -h (human readable output) and goes down -d2 (two folder levels down). Type the following followed by return: du -h -d2.Your Terminal is now at the top level of the hard disk. You can use Terminal as a quick way to find out what specifically is taking up disk space on your hard disk (other solutions such as DaisyDisk are available but require you to download, install and sometimes purchase).

Scan mac hard drive space