How to Free Up Storage on Your MacBook

Once you know what’s taking up the most space, you can target it directly instead of guessing.

STEP 2 Empty the Trash (Really Empty It)

This sounds obvious, but many people delete files without ever emptying the Trash. Everything you’ve deleted is still sitting on your drive until the Trash is emptied.

Right-click the Trash icon in your Dock and select Empty Trash. On older Macs with large Trash folders this alone can recover 10–20GB instantly.

STEP 3 Clean Up Your Downloads Folder

The Downloads folder is one of the most neglected corners of a MacBook. Most people download a file, use it once, and never touch it again. Over time this becomes a graveyard of old installers, PDFs, ZIP files, and disk images.

Open Finder, go to your Downloads folder, and sort by Size (click the Size column header in List view). You’ll immediately see the biggest offenders. Look out for:

• .dmg files — macOS installer disk images. Once you’ve installed the app, the .dmg is useless and can be deleted
• .zip and .pkg files — same story. If you’ve already extracted or installed them, they can go
• Large video files — downloaded videos, screen recordings, and Zoom recordings add up fast
• Old documents and PDFs — bank statements, receipts, and forms you downloaded years ago

STEP 4 Remove Apps You Don’t Use

Applications — especially creative software like Final Cut Pro, Logic, Adobe apps, and games — can be enormous. A single unused game can take 20–50GB.

Go to System Settings → General → Storage and click the Info button (ⓘ) next to Applications. macOS will show you all your apps sorted by size, along with when you last opened each one. If you haven’t opened an app in over a year, it’s a good candidate for removal.

STEP 5 Clear System Caches and Logs

macOS generates cache files constantly — browser caches, app caches, system logs, and temporary files. These are meant to speed things up, but over years they accumulate and take up significant space without any benefit.

You can manually clear user caches by opening Finder, pressing Cmd + Shift + G, and going to ~/Library/Caches. Select everything inside and delete it. macOS will rebuild whatever it needs.

STEP 6 Manage Your Photos Library

For most people, Photos is the single biggest consumer of storage. Years of iPhone backups, RAW files, and duplicate shots add up to tens of gigabytes quickly.

• Enable iCloud Photos — if you have iCloud storage, turn on Photos → Settings → iCloud → Optimise Mac Storage. macOS will keep full-resolution originals in iCloud and store smaller versions locally, potentially freeing dozens of gigabytes
• Delete duplicates — macOS Ventura and later has a built-in Duplicates album in Photos. Open Photos, scroll to Duplicates in the sidebar, and merge or delete them
• Review large videos — go to Photos → View → Sort by File Size. Large video clips are usually the biggest items and are easy to move to an external drive
• Empty the Recently Deleted album — just like the Trash, photos you delete in Photos aren’t gone until you empty the Recently Deleted album inside the app

STEP 7 Tackle “System Data”

The “System Data” category in macOS Storage is often the most confusing — and sometimes the biggest. It’s a catch-all for things macOS doesn’t categorise elsewhere, including Time Machine local snapshots, iOS backups, developer files, and virtual machine images.

Delete old iPhone and iPad backups: Go to System Settings → General → Storage → iOS Files. If you back up your iPhone to your Mac you may have multiple old backups sitting here. Delete all but the most recent one.

Remove Time Machine local snapshots: If you use Time Machine, macOS keeps local snapshots on your drive as a backup. You can remove them by opening Terminal and running:

tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /

This is safe — your actual Time Machine backup on the external drive is unaffected.

Clean up developer tools: If you use Xcode or any development tools, simulator runtimes and derived data can consume 20–50GB. In Xcode, go to Settings → Platforms and remove simulator runtimes you no longer need.

BONUS Use iCloud Drive to Offload Documents

If you’re running consistently low on storage, the most sustainable long-term solution is to move your Documents and Desktop folders to iCloud. macOS can automatically store them in the cloud and keep only recently used files locally.

Go to System Settings → Apple ID → iCloud → iCloud Drive → Options and enable Desktop & Documents Folders. With 200GB of iCloud storage — which costs less than 100 baht per month in Thailand — this essentially gives your MacBook an unlimited Documents folder.

• Quick wins — Empty Trash, clear Downloads, delete unused apps
• Medium effort — clean caches with OnyX, manage Photos library, delete old iPhone backups
• Long-term solution — enable iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive to offload storage automatically
• If nothing works — consider an SSD upgrade. Many older MacBook Pros and Airs can have their storage expanded affordably