Optimized Storage in macOS Sierra and later* can save space by storing your content in iCloud and making it available on demand. When storage space is needed, files, photos, movies, email attachments, and other files that you seldom use are stored in iCloud automatically. Each file stays right where you last saved it, and downloads when you open it. Files that you’ve used recently remain on your Mac, along with optimized versions of your photos.
* If you haven't yet upgraded to macOS Sierra or later, learn about other ways to free up storage space.
Jul 08, 2019 This post stems from a question by Mike, a reader. You have an old iPad (original, iPad 2, etc.) and over the years, it has become slow, the touch has lost its sensitivity, the apps often load pathetically slowly/get stuck and a bucket-load of other problems crop up.
Find out how much storage is available on your Mac
Choose Apple menu > About This Mac, then click Storage. Each segment of the bar is an estimate of the storage space used by a category of files. Move your pointer over each segment for more detail.
Click the Manage button to open the Storage Management window, pictured below. This button is available only in macOS Sierra or later.
Manage storage on your Mac
The Storage Management window offers recommendations for optimizing your storage. If some recommendations are already turned on, you will see fewer recommendations.
Store in iCloud
Click the Store in iCloud button, then choose from these options:
- Desktop and Documents. Store all files from these two locations in iCloud Drive. When storage space is needed, only the files you recently opened are kept on your Mac, so that you can easily work offline. Files stored only in iCloud show a download icon , which you can double-click to download the original file. Learn more about this feature.
- Photos. Store all original, full-resolution photos and videos in iCloud Photos. When storage space is needed, only space-saving (optimized) versions of photos are kept on your Mac. To download the original photo or video, just open it.
- Messages. Store all messages and attachments in iCloud. When storage space is needed, only the messages and attachments you recently opened are kept on your Mac. Learn more about Messages in iCloud.
Storing files in iCloud uses the storage space in your iCloud storage plan. If you reach or exceed your iCloud storage limit, you can either buy more iCloud storage or make more iCloud storage available. iCloud storage starts at 50GB for $0.99 (USD) a month, and you can purchase additional storage directly from your Apple device. Learn more about prices in your region.
Optimize Storage
Click the Optimize button, then choose from these options.
- Automatically remove watched movies and TV shows. When storage space is needed, movies or TV shows that you purchased from the iTunes Store and already watched are removed from your Mac. Click the download icon next to a movie or TV show to download it again.
- Download only recent attachments. Mail automatically downloads only the attachments that you recently received. You can manually download any attachments at any time by opening the email or attachment, or saving the attachment to your Mac.
- Don't automatically download attachments. Mail downloads an attachment only when you open the email or attachment, or save the attachment to your Mac.
Optimizing storage for movies, TV shows, and email attachments doesn't require iCloud storage space.
Empty Trash Automatically
Empty Trash Automatically permanently deletes files that have been in the Trash for more than 30 days.
Reduce Clutter
Reduce Clutter helps you to identify large files and files you might no longer need. Click the Review Files button, then choose any of the file categories in the sidebar, such as Applications, Documents, Music Creation, or Trash.
You can delete the files in some categories directly from this window. Other categories show the total storage space used by the files in each app. You can then open the app and decide whether to delete files from within it.
Learn how to redownload apps, music, movies, TV shows, and books.
Where to find the settings for each feature
The button for each recommendation in the Storage Management window affects one or more settings in other apps. You can also control those settings directly within each app.
- If you're using macOS Catalina, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click Apple ID, then select iCloud in the sidebar: Store in iCloud turns on the Optimize Mac Storage setting on the right. Then click Options next to iCloud Drive: Store in iCloud turns on the Desktop & Documents Folders setting. To turn off iCloud Drive entirely, deselect iCloud Drive.
In macOS Mojave or earlier, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click iCloud, then click Options next to iCloud Drive. Store in iCloud turns on the Desktop & Documents Folders and Optimize Mac Storage settings. - In Photos, choose Photos > Preferences, then click iCloud. Store in iCloud selects iCloud Photos and Optimize Mac Storage.
- In Messages, choose Messages > Preferences, then click iMessage. Store in iCloud selects Enable Messages in iCloud.
- If you're using macOS Catalina, open the Apple TV app, choose TV > Preferences from the menu bar, then click Files. Optimize Storage selects “Automatically delete watched movies and TV shows.”
In macOS Mojave or earlier, open iTunes, choose iTunes > Preferences from the menu bar, then click Advanced. Optimize Storage selects “Automatically delete watched movies and TV shows.” - In Mail, choose Mail > Preferences from the menu bar, then click Accounts. In the Account Information section on the right, Optimize Storage sets the Download Attachments menu to either Recent or None.
Empty Trash Automatically: From the Finder, choose Finder > Preferences, then click Advanced. Empty Trash Automatically selects “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days.”
Other ways that macOS helps automatically save space
With macOS Sierra or later, your Mac automatically takes these additional steps to save storage space:
- Detects duplicate downloads in Safari, keeping only the most recent version of the download
- Reminds you to delete used app installers
- Removes old fonts, languages, and dictionaries that aren't being used
- Clears caches, logs, and other unnecessary data when storage space is needed
How to free up storage space manually
Even without using the Optimized Storage features of Sierra or later, you can take other steps to make more storage space available:
- Music, movies, and other media can use a lot of storage space. Learn how to delete music, movies, and TV shows from your device.
- Delete other files that you no longer need by moving them to the Trash, then emptying the Trash. The Downloads folder is good place to look for files that you might no longer need.
- Move files to an external storage device.
- Compress files.
- Delete unneeded email: In the Mail app, choose Mailbox > Erase Junk Mail. If you no longer need the email in your Trash mailbox, choose Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items.
Learn more
- The Storage pane of About This Mac is the best way to determine the amount of storage space available on your Mac. Disk Utility and other apps might show storage categories such as Not Mounted, VM, Recovery, Other Volumes, Free, or Purgeable. Don't rely on these categories to understand how to free up storage space or how much storage space is available for your data.
- When you duplicate a file on an APFS-formatted volume, that file doesn't use additional storage space on the volume. Deleting a duplicate file frees up only the space required by any data you might have added to the duplicate. If you no longer need any copies of the file, you can recover all of the storage space by deleting both the duplicate and the original file.
- If you're using a pro app and Optimize Mac Storage, learn how to make sure that your projects are always on your Mac and able to access their files.
Keeping your Mac clean and running as fast and smoothly as possible often feels like an uphill battle. Most of us have a spring clean every few weeks or months and then before we know it, our poor old Mac is struggling under the weight of lots of files we don't need and a desktop cluttered with documents we haven't found the time to file away properly.
Quick tips to clean up and optimize a Mac
It doesn't have to be like that. Cleaning and optimizing your Mac can be quick and straightforward, if you put these tips into action.
Before you start, backup your Mac and check performance.
Clean Up Old Mac Apps Store
Cleaning tips to improve Mac performance
Backup.
It's always worth backing up your Mac before you run any scripts or delete anything. Get Backup Pro allows you to make a complete bootable clone of your Mac or choose which folders to synchronize.
Free Clean Up App
Check performance.
Launch iStat Menus from Setapp to check how your Mac is performing. You can then run it again after you've completed the steps below to see how much of a difference they've made and how much better your Mac is running.
Keep your desktop tidy
A tidy desktop doesn't just look better than a messy one, it makes files and documents easier to find and makes your Mac perform better too. That's because each file icon on your desktop is a window and has to be re-drawn every time the desktop changes or you move from one screen to another.
The easiest way to keep your desktop tidy is to use Declutter. This app allows you to store files in color-coded folders organized neatly on your desktop. Best of all, it automates keeping your desktop clean and tidy by moving files to the folders based on rules you set. All you have to do is download it, install it, and either use its default rules or create some rules of your own.
Get rid of duplicate files
What's worse than having files you don't need taking up space on your Mac? Having duplicates of those same files taking up even more space.
You can use Gemini, available in Setapp, to identify duplicate files and remove them easily. All you have to do is drop a folder onto Gemini’s window and tell it to scan for duplicates. When it’s done, click Review Results to see what it’s found or Smart Cleanup to delete duplicates straight away.
Delete Mail downloads
Whenever you double-click a Mail attachment on your Mac to open it, it's downloaded. Those downloads, over time, can take up a lot of space on your Mac. You have a number of options for dealing with them.
The first is to manually remove mail attachments by launching Spotlight:
- Type 'Mail Downloads' to navigate you the folder where downloads are stored
- Drag the files to the Trash. You can always download them again if you need them.
The second option is, if you're running macOS Sierra or later, to:
- Open About This Mac from the Apple menu
- Click the Storage tab then click Manage.
- Click on Mail and choose an option to deal with attachments.
The third, and simplest method is to:
- Launch a cleaner app like CleanMyMac and click on the Mail Attachment.
- Click Scan. When CleanMyMac is finished scanning your Mac, you can either click Clean to get rid of all the attachments it's found, or click Review and go through the attachments one by one and decide which ones you want to delete.
Pro tip: If you use Unibox as your email client, you can view attachments by sender and manage them quickly and easily.
Archive large old files
We all have files on our Mac we don't access regularly and which can either be archived elsewhere or deleted. It's helpful, however organize them in such a way as you can see which are the biggest culprits.
In CleanMyMac, click on Large & Old Files and click Scan. When it's finished, click on 'Group by' to view files by size, type or when they were last opened.
When you've identified files you want to archive, hover over it with the mouse pointer and click on the magnifying glass that appears. You'll be taken to the file's location in the Finder. You can now copy it to an external drive and delete it from your Mac.
Delete disk images, old installers and zip archives manually
Once you've installed an app or opened an archive, you no longer need the disk image or zip file. To get rid of them:
- Open a Finder window and start typing either 'dmg' – for a disk image – or 'zip' – for a zip archive into the search bar.
- When the dropdown options appear, choose File Type to search for disk images or zip archives.
- When the results appear, review them and drag those you don't need anymore to the Trash.
Tip: If you use The Unarchiver utility, you can set it to automatically delete a zip archive as soon as it has extracted files from it.
Clear out your Downloads folder
Your Downloads folder should be a temporary repository for files you download, not somewhere to store them permanently.
To dump old downloads:
- Open the folder and review its contents.
- File any items you want to keep in their rightful place and put everything else in the Trash.
Remove the system junk
Empty the Trash. Just as your Downloads folder isn't a permanent home for files, the Trash isn't a folder to store items you might want later. Putting stuff in the Trash doesn't free up space, it has to be emptied to do that. So, get into the habit of emptying the Trash regularly.
Empty caches and remove language files
It's not just web browsers that store data in cache files, macOS does it too. It's likely that you have several gigabytes of data in caches and language files.
You could delete these manually, by going to the Library folder in your user folder and searching for them. But CleanMyMac X makes it much easier.
Launch CleanMyMac, click on System Junk and then Scan. When it's finished, either click Clean to remove everything, or Review Details to choose what to delete and what to keep.
Delete files that 'Can't Be Deleted'
There are lots of reasons why macOS might refuse to delete a file. The most common is that the file is in use by an application or process. If that's the case, you'll usually get that error message when you try and empty the Trash.
How to get rid of files that refuse to be deleted:
- Quit any apps that are running and might be using the file
- If that doesn't help, it may be a process running in the background that's preventing the file being deleted. Restart your Mac and try emptying the Trash again.
- If the file still refuses to be deleted, it may be a login item that's using it. Restart your Mac again, this time holding down the Shift key, so your Mac starts in Safe Mode. This temporarily disables login items. Try and empty the Trash again, then restart your Mac normally.
- If none of the above manage to get rid of the file, you should try to delete it using Terminal:
- Launch Terminal from the Utilities folder in Applications
- Type: rm
- Press the spacebar
- Drag the file from the Trash onto the Terminal window
- Press Enter
- Type in your user password and press Enter again
If that doesn't work, try the same command, but add sudo at the start of the command. You'll need to be logged into an administrator account to use it, as it allows you to perform commands as a superuser, such as the root user.
There is one last thing on how to delete undeletable files you can try if all else fails:
- Restart your Mac while holding Command+R to start up from the recovery partition
- Choose Disk Utility from the macOS Utilities window
- In Disk Utility, click on the disk that contains the file you want to delete
- Select First Aid and repair the disk
- Restart your Mac normally
- Empty the Trash
The pesky file that refused to be deleted should now be gone.
Sound like a long painful procedure? There is an easier way. CleanMyMac’s Trash Bins utility will empty the Trash not just on your Mac’s main drive but on any disk you have connected to it as well. It will empty trash bins in apps, too! And best of all, it ignores Finder errors. To use it, choose Trash Bins in CleanMyMac’s Cleaning utility, then click Scan. When it’s done, press Empty.
Optimize your Mac's performance
You get a new Mac and everything’s going great, but as time goes on it invariably becomes slower. What are the ways to get it running at its best?
Run maintenance scripts
Recent versions of macOS are very robust, meaning you should never have to, for example, repair permissions. But there are several maintenance scripts that can improve the performance of your Mac.
In CleanMyMac, click on the Maintenance and click on each script to read a description of what it does. Tick the box next to the scripts you want to run then click Run.
Update your macOS
It’s a simple, but often overlooked, step: if your macOS is outdated, then it just might not be able to handle all the applications you’re running. Make sure you’re up to date with your software, so that nothing is lagging behind.
Use About This Mac to discover if there’s an update
Go to the Apple menu and click About This Mac. Press the Software Update button. If it takes you to the App Store and there’s an update waiting, press Update.
Minimize your Startup Items
We all like our applications ready and waiting for when we need them, but when too many are set to launch at startup, it can drag down our Macs’ performance.
Optimize your startup items with CleanMyMac utility:
- In CleanMyMac, click on the Optimization, then choose Login Items.
- Control which items are automatically launched in CleanMyMac by choosing “Enabled” or “Disabled.”
With fewer applications to gear up, your Mac’s RAM can focus on more immediate tasks.
Store your high-resolution photos in the cloud
iCloud Photo Library is a great way to store photos online and make them available on all your devices. It’s also a really quick way to transfer photos from your iPhone to your Mac. However, copying all those photos to your Mac will take up space and bandwidth of your Internet connection. The solution is to keep the original high-resolution items in iCloud and off your Mac.
Optimize Photos storage:
- Launch Photos and click on the Photos menu, then choose Preferences.
- Choose the iCloud tab, making sure iCloud Photo Library is checked
- And then check Optimize Mac Storage.
How To Clean Up A Mac
If you don’t use iCloud Library and don’t want to copy photos from an iPhone to your Mac automatically, uncheck the box labelled My Photo Stream.
Disable Siri
She is the virtual assistant some of us can’t live without, but the Mac’s “Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface” can be more of a hassle than help, particularly when it’s using up RAM you’d rather save for other tasks.
Stop Siri listening
To disable Siri, open “System Preferences” and select the Siri icon. Uncheck the “Enable Siri” tickbox. To remove the Siri dock icon, simply drag it to the desktop and watch it disappear.
Clean Up Old Mac Apps 2017
Following the advice above, you can leave your hard drive with plenty of space for the important documents and processes, run regular scans to catch any issues that might arise, and have your Mac maintain its great performance. And you know that a collection of utility apps from Setapp is there to assist you, anytime you need it.
If you follow the process described above with any sort of regularity, say once a month, you can be sure your Mac is operating at near top capacity. Sure, there are always more things you can do, but when the checklist gets too long, we begin to slack more often. So keep this in your arsenal and iterate as you try and test over time.