How to Delete Things from Macintosh HD

Many people advocate clearing temporary files occasionally to free up space, but unlike the above tricks, clearing temporary files only helps you... temporarily. Your computer keeps a collection of temporary files on its hard drive so it can re-access them later. It may not be the prettiest disk space analyzer available for macOS, but it's free and offers an exhaustive list of which folders, files, and file types are hogging your hard drive.

To find out what's taking up all that space, you can use the built-in Storage tab in About This Mac. Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the menu bar and choose About This Mac. If you're running macOS 10.12 Sierra or higher, you'll see a basic overview of what's using up so much space on your drive, such as documents, photos, music, and more.

But if you want to drill down even further into your system, you can use Disk Inventory X (Opens in a new window). This free tool will show you an exhaustive list of folders, files, and file types taking up space on your hard drive. Right-click any of these files to delete them, and you should be able to free up a decent amount of space.

For example, you may find that you have multiple gigabytes of video from an old project you no longer need, or huge iOS backups from devices you no longer own. The left sidebar in Disk Inventory X shows you each category, and you can click on them to see the biggest files of that type. If you discover you have 100GB of music on a 128GB drive, for example, then it's a fair bet you should clean up that iTunes library.

Remember to also empty the Trash when you're done - if files are in the Trash, they're still taking up space on your Mac! By deleting large files and clearing out unnecessary items, you can free up valuable space on your hard drive.

How to delete things from macintosh hd