Free Up Extra Space

The startup disk is the hard drive where the operating system, your applications and home folders are installed on. For most users, it’s the Macintosh HD. The system notifies the user when the hard drive is almost full with this message.

Don't ignore it because, if your startup disk is full, you may experience issues with software applications running incorrectly or crashing and a remarkable slowing down of the system.

There are several steps you can take to make sure you free up enough space. Generally, to keep your Mac performance high, it's recommended to maintain at least 15% of your hard disk free.

The first thing you should do, is to empty the Trash; users who rarely empty their trash can have GB of useless clutter taking up their disk space. Make sure the items contained are not needed and then proceed.

Another thing you can do is to clean up the download folder and the desktop. There might be old files that you don't need anymore. The same thing should be done with the movie folder: lots of apps write to this folder and there could be numerous files that you simply don’t need.

Even after you take these steps, it probably won't be enough. The most space is usually taken by the thousands of useless duplicates in your computer, which have to be eliminated. The application I use for this purpose is Tidy Up. It's the most complete and featured duplicate file finder and it's also easy to use. You can check out its characteristics clicking here.

After you delete all the duplicates, you may want to gain additional space. Tidy Up offers a range of different searches that help you quickly find the useless items, such as old cache files, old log files, old preference files, empty files and folders, and many others in the Advanced Mode. These files may not occupy a large space, but they still contribute to the slowing down of the computer.

If you want to free up additional space you can search for the large items, and delete or move them to an external hard drive. For this task, I still use Tidy Up. In the Advanced Mode it is possible to search for files of a specific kind that are greater than the chosen size. This way, you can analyze all the large files in your computer and decide what you wanna do with them. Tidy Up even allows you to burn a CD with those items: doing so, will allow you to store files that you seldom use without the need of buying a new hard disk.

Check out Tidy Up

When your Mac starts running slow or your hard disk is filling up, there are probably several files you don't need that are creating problems in your computer. These files can be unused preferences as well as old cache, empty files or empty folders.

It would be impossible to go through your hard disk to find all these files. You can use a software like Tidy Up, which is provided with ready searches to do this work. You just need to select the search and in a few seconds you'll have the result.

Your Mac will be cleaned up with a few clicks!

Take a look at Tidy Up

When you look for something using Spotlight, the more files you have on your hard disk, the more time it will take. Since Spotlight looks inside the email messages too, having a lot of messages will slow down the search. In addition, you will have a wider result to go through to find what you are looking for. This can become annoying, especially when many files you're checking are just duplicates.

One thing you can do to stop this process, is to eliminate all the duplicate emails in your mailbox. However, to do so, you definitely need a software that does the work for you. The software I recommend is Tidy Up; it is very fast and easy to use. You can find and delete all the duplicate emails in just a few clicks, thanks to its pre-defined email search.

See the tutorial Check out Tidy Up