Change the search parameters to “This Mac”, then choose “File Size” as the primary search operator.Go to any folder within the Mac Finder if you haven’t done so already, then hit Command+F to bring up the Finder Search feature.This is easy to use and quite helpful for remedying the “startup disk almost full” error message, here’s what you’ll want to do: 2: Use Finder Search to Track Down Large Filesĭid you know OS X can help you locate files with large sizes? Yes indeed, and using the Mac Search feature to find large files makes quick work of locating and deleting junk that is no longer needed but takes up space anyway. You can learn more about the “Other” storage space in Mac OS X and how to clear it out here. In those cases, you may want to offload them to an external hard drive for backups, a 5TB external drive on Amazon is affordable and will offer an abundant of disk space for such purposes.įinally, many users discover that Other is taking up a fair amount of storage, this is usually stuff like downloads, caches, and whatever else doesn’t fall into the obvious media classifications. A common example is discovering that “Photos” or “Movies” takes up many GB of local disk space but you don’t want to delete those files for obvious reasons. Sometimes you’ll discover your disk space has vanished to files you want to keep, however. Perhaps the “Backups” section is taking up many GB of space from locally stored iDevice backup files going back to the year 1400 BCE, you can delete old iPhone and iPad backups from iTunes easily and safely, just be sure you keep recent backups of devices, or use iCloud. You’ll often see things that are immediately actionable in this list. Review the storage usage to see what is eating up space and where you can focus your initial efforts on reclaiming some storage capacity.

Choose the “Storage” tab (older versions of OS X need to click on ‘More Info’ before the Storage tab appears).

Open the  Apple menu and go to “About This Mac”.

Mac users can quickly see what’s taking up disk space through the system Storage summary, this can help lead you on the right path and give you an idea of what’s going on and where to look. As always, don’t delete files if you do not know what they are used for! 1: Get an Overview of What’s Eating Up Mac Startup Disk Space It’s good practice to start a manual backup of the Mac with Time Machine before removing anything, this insures that if you accidentally delete the wrong thing you can get it back.

We’ll cover some easy tips on how to quickly figure out what’s taking up the disk space on the Mac, as well as how to clear out storage capacity in order to resolve an almost full Mac.

Start up disk full on mac