Making space on my Late 2013 iMac

[sultanoflondon]

Hi all,

I have a Late 2013 iMac & after a software update today couldn't be performed due to lack of storage, I realised that there is just 11 GB left in the 1 TB HDD.

I don't really have much on it, perhaps 100 GB of documents, 150 GB of photos & 150 GB of audio files.

Any recommendations on how to clear some space for the update?

thank you!

 

[Ruggy]

A couple of things might help.
If you click on the Apple logo top left then 'about this mac'> 'storage'> manage
You then get two options that may help.
The first offers you icloud storage so you may well be able to move a load of stuff to icloud for a month, then move it back again. It'll only cost you a month's storage. It's a good idea to use icloud for things like keychain passwords anyway.

The other is 'reduce clutter' and it gives you an overview of when you last used programs and files and their size.
Very quick then to make decisions about what to get rid of.
I'd start with those two before buying anything or going any deeper.
Best

 

[flowrider]

With today's HDD & SSD prices being so low, it's hard to understand folks having storage problems. If you have removed all the fluff and non essential stuff, and you still don't have room. Buy yourself an external drive and transfer some of your files to a new device.

I'm not a believer in cloud storage for a number of reasons.

Lou

 

[BrianBaughn]

A friend of mine was having issues running out of space and even after deleting files the drive would fill up again!

I don't know all of the details but turning iCloud Drive OFF fixed it for him.

 

[Honza1]

I hate these tools, but this may be one case to try those. One of the Mac Cleaning tools? If you have only 400GB of files you know/care about, somewhere is 600GB of stuff. System is only 20-30 Gb, so you have 550+GB of unknown stuff there. Cleaning trash may help if you did not do it for long time. Checking, if some old Snapshots are hanging around is also useful. But you need to figure out where the 550Gb of "stuff' is and what is it.
Alternative is to go the crazy way - use Carbon Copy Cloner to create bootable copy of your system on external drive, boot from that, wipe the internal drive, install fresh macOS on the clean disk and use Migration assistant to move stuff back, only the stuff you want. Make sure you have two backups and expect this to take few hours.
But seems excessive.
My friend recently run out of disk space. Before I started fixing failing system, I asked, what he did different recently... "nothing special"... Ended up finding 400+Gb of movies on the system drive which had 500Gb size. Had only 5Gb free space. "Nothing special" Having fast internet speeds can be nightmare ;-)

 

[Taz Mangus]

Look at the below link and see if it helps.

How to clear System Data on Mac - iGeeksBlog

To clear System Data on Mac, 1. Delete DMG files and old downloads, 2. Uninstall browser extensions and plug-ins, 3. Remove cache files, 4. Delete Application Support files...

www.igeeksblog.com