Optimising storage in MacBook Pro issues

OmniDiskSweeper, as others have mentioned is probably the quickest way to find the largest occupants of your internal disk storage.

Photos, Music, and email (and email attachments) will most likely occupy the most space. Do NOT delete anything in your Macintosh or User Libraries.

You should also report back here as to what you do and the results of your efforts. That may help others with the same problem.

I have a daughter that never cleans out the Downloads folder and never empties Trash or Mail Trash. "What if I can't find what I want and have go get it again?" Trash is just that, and not temporary storage!..I gave up and add an external drive so she could periodically transfer the oldest files to that.

Hopefully you have a full and complete current backup on an external drive, preferably a clone created by CarbonCopy Cloner or Super Duper.

Boot into Recovery (see MacOS help) and reinstall your OS. I think you have the option in Recovery to erase your drive and then install the OS. This should replace all of your existing System storage with only what is required to run your Mac. You can then use Migration Assistant to bring back all of your data from the external drive.

no-idea-what-to-do wrote:

I am almost out of storage and can't update. System data takes up almost all of the storage and I keep seeing goto storage and recommendations and optimize storage. I have no recommendations! Is there any other to find recommendations on my MacBook Pro?

How to free up storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

Free up storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

Do some general housekeeping, if in doubt

Try something like OmniDiskSweeper for a GUI to get a good look at itemized file size and location:

OmniDiskSweeper http://www.omnigroup.com/more

or from Terminal.app for itemized list of file size in your user, copy and paste:

sudo du -h -d 1 ~/

let it run till completion

What this means is you should either use a cloud service or purchase an external USB drive, then move large folders and files. Examples of this would be movie files, Download files in Download folder. Documents like PDF's, photos as some examples. Move them to the could service or onto your external USB drive. You should have approximately 15-20% of your total drive size left free so the system has room to operate it's cache and housekeeping operations.