Recently I've noticed my macbook pro has been slowing down a bit. To try and speed it up I am trying to free up some space on my hard drive. When I looked at how much of my hard drive is being used, I saw that 230gb is being used by apps. This seems really excessive and doesn't look right to me. Anybody got any ideas as to what I can do to free up some space?
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)
Hard drive space and ‘Other’:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202867
Also, try to rebuild the Spotlight index: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716
Select the Applications folder on your hard drive. Right-click on it and choose Get Info. Compare the size of the folder shown there with what's shown on your graph.
I did this and the size of the folder is much smaller! 13gb compared to 230gb. This is quite strange.
Forcing Spotlight to rebuild its index will likely resolve the discrepancy. Follow the instruction from Klaus1 above.
I did this and it only took the app usage down to 218gb. Its really strange because at the top it says free space is 428gb of 499gb, but the says 218gb is being used by apps.
Do you use TimeMachine for backups, or have turned it on then off?
If Yes, TM creates "local snapshots" as a way of backing up your content when your laptop is not connected to your TimeMachine hard drive. The storage space these files take up will be released if you ever need it for your own files. This is what causes the numerical confusion: in one location the Finder lists the snapshots as used space, but it excludes them when calculating the free storage space (because it will be released if needed).
Bottom line: you've got nothing to worry about. You can read more about this here About Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support
Apps using too much hard drive space
