Summary :

Free Up Disk Space For Mac Catalina; How to free up disk space on Mac using compression? Open Finder and go to your Documents. Command + click on a folder (or multiple folders). Choose Compress. Be aware that macOS leaves the original file untouched, so once you have the archive, the original folder can be deleted. The quickest way to free up. Jul 21, 2021 Free up storage space on your Mac Save space by storing your content in iCloud or using built-in tools to find and remove large or unneeded files. The Optimized Storage features of your Mac help you save storage space by storing your content in iCloud and making it available on demand.

Emptying trash on Mac will completely remove them and free up the disk space. However, Mac OS has multiple trash cans, so you may need to empty more than one. To empty main trash of your user account: Step 1: CTRL-Click or right click on the trash icon at the bottom right corner. Step 2: Now, choose empty trash. It will delete all the files. This tool is used to clean up the system junks on your Mac such as the System Cache, System Logs, Application Cache, User Logs, Localization and more to optimize overall performance while also cleaning up unwanted files to free up disk space.

From this MiniTool article, you can know what the startup disk on your Mac is, what is taking up space on the Mac startup disk, the influence of startup disk full, and how to clear the startup disk space when the startup disk is full or your disk is almost full on your Mac.

What Is Startup Disk on Mac?

Like a Windows startup disk, the startup disk on your Mac is the disk that saved the operating system on your Mac. It is an important disk on your computer. If the operating system on the disk is corrupted or even the startup disk is damaged, your Mac computer will not boot normally.

What Is Taking Up Space on Your Mac Startup Disk?

As you know, a Mac computer’s disk is usually not as large as a Windows computer’s disk. As of 2020, Apple has improved the disk capacity and the maximum disk size can reach up to 8TB. But they are the Pro series, which are not widely used.

Most of the time, you should not worry about the disk space issue because macOS always do work online. This will not take up much disk space. However, what’s going on if you see a pop-up alert saying Your startup disk is almost full?

At this time, you should know what is taking up space on the startup disk of your Mac and then take some measures to clear the startup disk.

The hidden website cache takes much space on the startup disk. For example, statistics show that Google Chrome can create numerous cache folders after you visit some web sites. The size of the cache for one site can even reach up to 9 GB. This is quite surprising, but it is true.

As time goes on, the free space on the startup disk becomes less and less. One day, you may receive the startup disk full alert.

Besides, when a warning of Your disk is almost full pops up, it also means that there is not enough space on your Mac. It is equal to startup disk full. Likewise, you need to remove some files to free up disk space on your Mac computer.

What Does It Mean When Your Startup Disk Is Full?

When does it mean when you receive your startup disk is almost full alert?

It has two main influences:

1. You will soon run out of space on the startup disk.

Your startup disk is almost full is an early warning for you. It reminds you of cleaning up the startup disk. However, if you continue to use your Mac without cleaning up disk space, more and more data will be saved to the startup disk. One day, your Mac will run out of space and you will not use the machine as normal.

2. Your Mac computer will run slowly.

Some of you may think that your Mac computer will not be affected when there is space in the startup disk no matter it is much or less. It is wrong.

A Mac computer can convert the available free space on the startup disk into virtual memory that you use for day-to-day operations. In theory, there should be at least 10% of free disk space for your Mac to operate. If not, your Mac computer will run slowly and even face big trouble like Mac frozen.

When the machine detects that the available space on the startup disk is insufficient, it will give you a warning. This aims to remind you it’s time to clear the startup disk on your Mac.

What should you do when your startup disk is full on your Mac? In the following part, we will show you some solutions.

How to Clear the startup Disk?

If you want to clear your Mac startup disk, you need to delete the unnecessary files on it. Before doing this, you can check the storage space on your Mac.

How to Check the Storage Space on Your Mac?

1. Click the Apple menu from the top-left corner of the screen.
2. Click About This Mac from the drop-down list.
3. Switch to the Storage section.

After these three steps, you can see the storage information of your Mac disk, including the files’ types, the free space on the drive, and more.

If your Mac Startup disk is full, you can do these things to free up disk space:

How to Clean the Startup Disk on Your Mac?

1. Remove the App Cache from your Mac.
2. Empty Trash.
3. Delete the unnecessary Time Machine backup snapshots.
4. Delete browser cache.
5. Remove language packs.
6. Use Startup Disk Full Fixer.

Tip 1: Remove the App Cache from Your Mac

The app cache files are necessary when you want to speed up processes. Once you complete the process, the cache files become useless. But these cache files will stay on the startup disk for a long time unless you manually delete them. When they are useless, they are junk files. To clean up your Mac startup disk, you need to remove them from the machine.

1. Go to Finder > Go > Go to Folder.
2. Type ~/Library/Caches.
3. Go into each folder and then delete the files in it. You can also choose to only delete the files that take up the most space.
4. You can repeat the above three steps for /Library/Caches to remove the App cache.

Tip 2: Empty Trash

When you delete files from your Mac, they will be moved to Trash. The files on Trash also occupy space on your Mac startup disk. As long as you are sure that you don’t need to use these files anymore, you can empty Trash to free up disk space.

To do this job, you just need to open Trash and then click the Empty button on the top-right side to remove files from your Mac. Since then, there will be more available disk space on your Mac.

Tip 3: Delete the Unnecessary Time Machine Backup Snapshots

Most people would like to use Time Machine to back up their Mac files to an external hard drive. You may think that the backup files are save to the external hard drive. But that’s not all. During the Mac data process, the local snapshots also automatically start once every 24 hours. That’s right. The snapshots are saved to your Mac, taking up disk space.

You can delete the unnecessary Time Machine backup snapshots to release space on the startup disk.

1. Open Finder.
2. Go to Go > Utilities.
3. Double-click Terminal to open it.
4. Type sudo tmutil disablelocal into Terminal, and press Enter.

Do you know how to delete Time Machine backups on your Mac computer? In this post, we will show you different cases and different methods.

Tip 4: Delete Browser Cache

Every time you visit a new web site using your web browser, some cache files will be created and saved to your Mac disk. This can help you to quickly a previous page again. But these files can also use up your disk space. So, you can delete these browser cache files to release more space on your Mac:

1. Open your web browser.
2. Click the History tab and then select Clear browsing data.
3. Select the cache files you want to delete like Cookies, site data, Cached images and files.
4. Choose how far back you want to delete
5. Click the Clear browsing data button to delete the selected cache files.

Tip 5: Remove Language Packs

Most apps contain language packs (which are also known as localization files). These packs allow you to switch between languages when using the app. They are useful, but you need to admit that you only need one or two languages. The rest language packs just waste your disk space. You can choose to delete them:

1. Open Applications.
2. Right-click an app and then select Show Package Contents.
3. Click Contents.
4. Click Resources.
5. Delete the language packs you don’t need to use. The pack files are ending in .Iproj.
6. Repeat these steps for all other apps on your Mac.

Tip 6: Use Startup Disk Full Fixer

Startup Disk Full Fixer is the best free app for you to perform a quick Mac disk cleanup. It can help you to get more free storage space in less than a minute. You can go to the Mac App Store to free download this application. Then, you can open it and use it to clean up your startup disk to get rid of the low disk space warning. It is a safe program. You can feel free to use it.

How to Free up Disk Space on Your Mac?

Your disk is almost full is another alert that prompts you to clear disk space on your Mac computer. We have published a related article to free up disk space on Mac: How to Clear Disk Space on Mac and Recover Mac Data?

If you have some other good ideas to release disk space on Mac, you can share them with us in the comment. We will appreciate that.

If You Delete Some Important Files on Your Mac by Mistake

As you can see, it is a file deletion process when you clear the startup disk on your Mac. During the process, you may delete some of your important files by mistake. Once these files are permanently deleted from your Mac computer, you will be unable to restore them from Trash. If you want to retrieve them, you can try the free Mac data recovery software: Stellar Data Recovery for Mac.

This software has a trial edition. You can use it to scan the Mac disk you want to recover data from and then check whether it can find the files you want to rescue. If yes, you can upgrade it to a full edition and then use it to recover all your needed files to a suitable location. You can go to the MiniTool download center to get this trial edition.

1. Open this software.

2. Select the data types you want to restore. If you want to recover all, you can turn on the button for Recover Everything.

3. Click the Next button to continue.

4. This software will list all the drives it can detect. Then, you need to select the drive you want to recover from. If you want to perform a deep scan, you need to switch the button for Deep Scan to ON.

5. Click the Scan button to start the scanning process.

6. When the scanning process ends, you can see the scan results. By default, these files are list by Classic List. There are two other lists including File List and Deleted List. If you only need to recover the deleted files, you can switch to Deleted List and then find your needed items.

7. This software allows you to preview files. You can just double-click on one file to preview it and confirm whether it is your needed file.

8. If you are sure this software finds your needed files, you can go to MiniTool official site to get a license of an advanced edition to upgrade this software. After that, you can select files and then save them to a suitable folder. Here, you need to know that the destination folder should not be the original one. Otherwise, the deleted files could be overwritten and become unrecoverable.

Bottom Line

When your startup disk is full or you see the alert of your disk is almost full on your Mac, you can just try the methods mentioned in this article to free up disk space and remove the warning. If you mistakenly delete important files, you can use Stellar Data Recovery for Mac to get them back.

Should you have any related issues, you can let us know in the comment. You can also contact us via [email protected].

Startup Disk Full FAQ

Today in 2021, MacBooks are more spacious than ever. The new MacBook Air comes with a 256-GB hard drive. But no amount of storage seems to be enough as the ever-inflating digital media is taking over our hard drives. Cloud servers are only a partial answer to that. They aren’t getting cheaper and consume insane amounts of the world’s electricity. So if you want to take a load off your drive and help the planet, you should teach yourself a couple of storage-keeping tricks. Let’s go.

What’s causing low disk space on your Mac?

Before you begin to free up disk space, let’s identify what’s taking it up. From the Apple Menu in the upper left-hand corner of your screen, select About This Mac and then click the Storage tab in the window that opens. You’ll get a handy, color-coded graph that looks like this:

In the above example, you can see that apps, audio files, and “other” (for details on what this “other” category consists of, look here) are taking the most significant amount of space.

It’s nice to see what’s stored on your Mac, and even nicer to be able to browse the folders that contain the files themselves. Now that you’ve identified what’s on your drive let’s free up some space.

How to increase disk space on your Mac

There are several options here, so let’s go through a few.

1. Remove large and old files

Often the files that end up taking the most space are tucked away in “cold storage” on your computer. These are big movies, photos, or the like that you rarely look at but can’t part with, either. In this case, archiving the files and moving them to an external drive is a good way to free up storage space on your Mac.
Locating huge neglected files can be a pain, but it gets super easy with the CleanMyMac X app. It has a dedicated Large & Old File finder. It will help you find massive files and sort them by size to define the largest ones quickly.

You can download the free version of CleanMyMac X here.

As the name suggests, it finds files that occupy a lot of space on your disk but haven’t been opened for a long time. You can quickly review these files right in the app and decide which ones you want to remove. It’s a really handy feature if you have a lot of heavy stuff piled up.

2. Empty Trash

Review your Trash bin’s contents one last time before you empty it. Press Command and right-click the Trash folder on your Trash icon. Then, click Empty Trash to remove everything.

Use Command-Option-Delete to delete any folder immediately, bypassing Trash.

3. Clean up the Downloads folder

Files love to hide in your Mac’s Downloads folder. Old disk images, random photos, unused extensions, ZIP files… they’re all in there, not making a sound. Hiding. ? Go to Finder and browse what’s sitting in your Downloads, wasting space on your disk. Anything unnecessary can be dragged to the Trash.

4. Delete duplicate folders and files

How many times do we copy or download things twice? Like many users, I would prefer to have a backup twin of my important files. But that often ends up in my files being quadrupled…or what do they call a 4th or 5th copy of the same folder?

To effectively remove duplicate files and make space on Mac, you can use Gemini 2. This is how this app looks.

You can download this little duplicate finder here.

Gemini 2 analyzes potential duplicates by many criteria, not just the name of the file. It searches for:

• Duplicate folders
• Duplicate movies
• Similar images

5. Learn to use Optimized Storage

Optimized Storage is the built-in feature of the macOS. It’s a sorting algorithm that shows different categories of files on your Mac for review and removal.

1. Click the Apple Menu > About This Mac > Storage.
2. Choose “Manage…”

By far, the most-space demanding of your files will be Applications.

Using the quick tabs above, you will decide what is there you can toss away. Make sure also to check Recommendations (on top of the list). There are a couple more space-saving options there.

6. Uninstall unused applications

If you’re like me, you often try an app “...just to see what it does”. While that’s fun, it frequently results in a slew of forgotten apps. It’s a good practice to set a reminder to review your Applications folder and clean out the ones you no longer use. However, note that simply dragging an app into your Mac’s trash doesn’t eliminate all of its related files.

CleanMyMac X's Uninstaller feature, on the other hand, leaves no leftover pieces behind, which means more available space on your Mac. CleanMyMac X finds every app-related document and file, no matter where it has been tucked away and deletes it from your Mac.

And speaking of setting up a reminder, CleanMyMac’s scheduler will handle that task for you, too. Just tell it how often you’d like to be prompted to give your Mac a good cleaning and leave the rest to the app.

7. Delete your Desktop screenshots

Mac’s Desktop is where you keep screenshots by default. With a feature called “Stacks,” you can organize your Desktop into clearly labeled folders. One of such folders will be Screenshots, which you can later remove in one sweep.

1. Go to your desktop.
2. Right-click somewhere in the middle of your Desktop.
3. Select “Use Stacks”

Free Up Disk Space Macbook

How To Clear Space On Macbook

Now you should see the Screenshots folder with all your screengrabs neatly stuffed inside. Drag this folder to the Trash and empty it.

8. Get rid of system junk

It’s not just your files that are hogging disk space — it’s also useless system files like logs, cache, unused binaries, old iOS backups and installers, and what not. Fortunately, CleanMyMac can find and eliminate them all to make low disk space a thing of the past, at last.

System junk is comprised of:

• User cache files
• Application cache
• Broken downloads
• Unused .DMG installers

As you can see, the 'User cache' category alone can recover about 3 GB of space. So the best way to free up space on Mac is to start with this type of files.

With just a few clicks, you’ll discover what’s where and what’s ripe for deletion. The best way to free up hard drive space is to run CleanMyMac X and wave goodbye to space-hogging files. Don’t worry. You won’t miss them. Hopefully, you managed to clear a lot of disk space — drop by for more Mac housekeeping tips. 😉