Mac Storage Management: An introduction

Got a messy Mac? Running out of storage space? Too much clutter on the desktop? Read on for tips on how to you can clean up your Mac.

Clean up and Optimize your storage:

Use Spotlight search (command + space) and type "storage" then select it:

Once opened you'll be presented with some recommendations:

Store in iCloud:

Fairly self-explanatory however one of the useful features to note is that all of your documents, photos and messages will be available and sync'd across all of your Mac devices. If you have an iPhone you can easily look at that document you saved on your laptop and suddenly need.

Optimize Storage: 

If you're a TV episode binge watcher or a big movie fan and you watch on your laptop often, this is a very good option to enable. Downloading a lot of episodes or movies can quickly consume your hard drive space.

Empty Trash Automatically:

This option should be used with some caution. If you have have any sort of habit of deleting files and then later going back digging in your trash to find it again, you may want to consider not enabling this option. Otherwise this can be a useful option, the trash can accumulate and consume a lot of hard drive space.

Reduce Clutter:

This is a very useful utility as it allows you to take a look at what's consuming your space in multiple ways:

Large Files: Typically this will be files downloaded from the internet, in example above you'll see a couple of software installers that are no longer needed and are just taking up space.

Downloads: Self-explanatory, but useful in that it allows you to sort though the downloads by Name, Type, Last Accessed and size.

Unsupported Apps: These are applications that used to run, but are now incompatible with your device. Typically this will happen when a vendor does not update their app to meet the requirements of a new OS version. Since these apps will no longer function, there is no point to keeping them.

Containers: This will typically be empty and cleared when restarting the Mac, this is a data storage location for what are called "Sandboxed Apps". It is not recommended that you delete anything here unless you are absolutely sure it is safe or if the vendor of the application recommends you take this action.

File Browser:

Not much different than opening up a Finder window, but in this view you can quickly and easily see what folders are taking up space in one simple view. You can then go on to quickly browse those folders and see what you can delete. Useful when you want to quickly take a look through the most common places a lot of space will be consumed.