How to see what’s using all your Mac storage

Programs
are growing in size, games often exceed 50GB, Mac often uses lots of storage in
unexplained ways and makes it difficult for you to find out exactly what’s
going on. Not knowing what’s on your disk is a good way to lose some of it. As
Dave’s Computers is concentrating on data recovery and loss, we want to help
you avoid that!

This
tutorial will show you exactly what is using your hard drive space so you can
clean it up.

Finder
isn’t always as good as we would like when it comes to analyzing disk space. It
can find lots of programs and files but misses quite a few as well. We don’t
trust it here at Dave’s Computers and use third party tools instead. You may
benefit from doing the same.

Daisy Disk

Daisy Disk is a great looking disk analyzer that tells
you exactly what’s going on with your drives. It has a free trial but is
otherwise just $10. It’s a very simple app to use but powerful under the hood.
Through a very straightforward UI you can see exactly what is installed on your
Mac, how much disk space it uses and even delete it from within the app.

Daisy Disk
also works with attached storage and network storage so if you have external
disks, you can maintain those too.

GrandPerspective

GrandPerspective
is another data visualizer that is a version of a Windows app that works the
same way. It’s a graphical representation of your disk that lets you drill down
to exactly what is where and how much disk it uses. You can then delete the
data as you need.

Be careful
though. Get GrandPerspective from the App Store and you’ll pay $1.99 for it. Download it directly from the source and it’s free. The program is open
source so you really shouldn’t need to pay for it.

OmniDiskSweeper

OmniDiskSweeper is another free disk analyzer to see what’s
using all your Mac storage. It isn’t as pretty as Daisy Disk or GrandPerspective
but gets the job done. The interface is a bit like Finder and lists everything
on your drives in a hierarchical layout. You can see which folders take up most
space and can drill down until you know exactly what is installed where.

OmniDiskSweeper
is also free and is regularly updated by the team behind it.

Whatever
tool you use to check your Mac disk space, run it and then run About This Mac
and Storage to see how much MacOS misses. I bet you’ll see far more data with
these tools than within the Storage app!

If you need
help optimizing your Mac, need to replace a hard disk or free up space, Dave’s
computers in New Jersey can help. We are Apple experts and would be more than
happy to prove it!