Q: Hello, I want to upgrade to OS X Mavericks but it keeps telling me to free up space on my start up disk.  I deleted many files and i still cannot download it.  What do I do delete everything?

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive

  1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' Storage Display.

  2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.

  3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.

  4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.

  5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.

  6. See The Storage Display.

You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.

You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.

Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

You need at least 12 GBs of free space to install Mavericks plus another 6 GBs for the download.

Select your HDD icon. Press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window. In the upper most panel you will see the information displayed: Capacity, Available, and Used. You want to know what's Available.