The developers of macOS Sierra added several features to free up space using iCloud. Let’s take a look at how you could optimize data storage on your Mac with macOS Sierra.
What is purgeable space on Mac?
The users of macOS often face problems where it seems that some amount of disk space is being consumed by hidden files and folders and it can be difficult to detect what is going on. Below, we’ll go over a few options for freeing up Mac storage, as well as several ways to find out what large files and more are hiding on your computer. Sometimes the amount of used disk space may exceed the total size of all scanned files and folders. However, significant amounts of data may be hiding in directories of other local users or folders that are inaccessible by conventional scanning. To view their contents, you need to scan the disk with administrator rights.
Modern Mac models are equipped with fast, but modest SSD storage. 128 or 256 GB is quickly clogged with useful data, games, documents, and content. Over time, there is a shortage of free space, quick cleaning does not give results, and the analysis of the system load indicates the main eater of space – the “Other” section.
The system includes in this category:
- documents that are stored on disk or in the application cache (for example, when automatically saving);
- archives and disk images;
- temporary files and user data;
- library files, application cache, plugins, add-ons, and program extensions;
- virtual machine files.
The developers included to the macOS Sierra many hard drive space recovery features. Some files are unnecessary or rarely used, such as log files, application installers, and duplicate files. But in some situations, free hard disk space can display different information. There are several options, as you can see what is taking up space.
An easier way consists of the following steps:
- On the menu bar, click the Apple icon, then About This Mac.
- Click on the “Storage” tab. Disk Utility displays this information as well.
- In the Finder sidebar, choose you’re the data about your PC.
- Right-click the hard drive icon, navigate to the “Get Info” option.
How to clear purgeable space?
The optimization process is the only way to manage storage cleanup on your computer. You cannot manually clear it, and it would not be a great idea because you don’t know exactly what you are cleaning. So, how to clear system storage on a mac?
In macOS Sierra, Apple introduced a Mac Storage optimization. If you have enabled this feature and you do not have enough memory, the space will be automatically reclaimed if you need space when adding large files.
To access the new storage optimization features:
- Click on the Apple icon in the upper left corner of the screen.
- In the menu that appears, select the top item “About This Mac”.
- The “System Information” window will open, in which there is a “Storage” tab with a “Manage” button.
The interface that opens shows how much space on the hard disk is occupied by files of different types. In the Recommendations section, Apple provides some tips to free up local storage. These guidelines may differ from user to user.
The macOS Sierra drive cleanup features aren’t limited to moving files to the cloud. The system also offers to delete movies watched in iTunes (you can download and watch them later), convert images for better placement in iCloud, and much more.