clean mac

Disk Space - Free Up

Disk Space – Free Up (2)

Disk Space – Free Up (3)

Disk Space - Free Up - Mavericks

Disk Space Filling Up – OmniDiskSweeper       10.8+

Disk Space Filling Up - WhatSize

Disk Space - Other      in High Sierra and later, this is now included in System

Disk Space - "Other" and What Can I Do About It?

Backups. Seriously. Backups are the best solution for cleaning, for having installed malware—most of the Mac malware is apps that we install—and for recovering from a hardware or software problem, or for upgrading to a new Mac.

Backups. Routine. Regular. Complete. Backups. Time Machine works very well for this, or maybe a third-party tool.

If something does goes sideway or if your Mac happens to have been damaged or lost or stolen or fails (and if a reboot or booting into Safe Mode doesn’t clear it), the Apple Migration Assistant tools can use a backup to wipe the entire environment and then create a new macOS installation, and with your existing content and apps and documents and settings all preserved.

More than a little of the Mac malware around claims to be cleaning apps, optimizers, security apps, and malware-removal apps. The rest tends to be sketchy free stuff, or heavily-advertised apps and specifically apps you didn’t go looking for, too.

Have backups.

Off-loading stuff and deleting stuff can be one option, but there might be a better option.

Which model of Mac, and which year?

If this is an older Mac (and Mavericks could imply that), it may be possible to upgrade the internal storage.

What the folks selling the third-party cleaning apps don’t necessarily tell us is that it’s usually our own stuff that's filling our storage, and that we might have purchased too little storage with our Mac, and that an upgrade might be a good way to add storage capacity, and—if we originally bought a hard disk drive with the Mac—we might also massively speed up our Mac with an SSD upgrade.

Pretty much any Mac can also be connected to external storage, particularly if the Mac is not moving around, or not moving often. Whether or not the internal storage can be upgraded.

Newer Macs can be more difficult to upgrade internal storage, which means we need to be better at guessing our requirements when we buy.

TB is a trillion bytes of storage, in that particular usage. What’s commonly referred to as a terabyte.

From Apple, the MacBook Air 2017 was available with either 128 or 256 gigabytes of storage; with 128 or 256 billion bytes of storage.

Yes, seemingly these are some big numbers. But you’re currently exceeding your present installed storage capacity. Which means either “dieting” your data to fit into your current storage capacity, or letting out the proverbial “belt” a few notches with a storage hardware upgrade.

A one-terabyte (1 TB) storage upgrade would quadruple the largest Apple-provided storage offered in that MacBook Air.

For completeness, common measures of storage capacity include kilobytes (thousands of bytes), megabytes (millions of bytes), gigabytes (billions) and terabytes (trillions). Yes, there are yet larger measures, and yes, some of us are using yer larger storage on our computers. And a “byte” is the storage of a single and simplest character of text, or of other small hunks of data.

There are no good cleaning programs for a Mac. Most posters recommend not using cleaning programs or anti-virus programs. They can destroy normal computer operations.

You are welcome.

MacBook Air 2017 can be upgraded to 2 TB.

This Mac already has an SSD, so this upgrade would provide additional storage capacity and not added performance.