What's taking up space on your Mac?
Most full disks have the same few causes. This guide shows where to look first with the tools your Mac already has, and then how a disk map shows everything at once.
Start with the Storage panel
Open the Apple menu, then System Settings › General › Storage. macOS shows a bar split by category: Apps, Documents, Photos, System Data. The bar tells you which category is big. It does not tell you which folder.
Five places where space usually goes
- Downloads. Installers and files you opened once. Sort the folder by size in Finder.
- Caches. Apps keep temporary files in
~/Library/Caches. They are rebuilt when needed. - iPhone and iPad backups. Old backups live in
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backupand can take tens of gigabytes each. - Developer folders.
node_modulesin every project, and Xcode's~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData. - Photo and video libraries. One Photos library or one folder of screen recordings can outweigh everything else.
See all of it at once
Checking folders one by one is slow, and the biggest one is often where you did not look. A disk map scans the whole disk and draws every folder by size. DiskSphere draws it as a 3D sphere, a sunburst chart or a treemap, and moves what you choose to the Trash.
Before you delete
Move things to the Trash and empty it later, when you are sure. Leave system folders and your Library alone unless you know what a folder is for.