Summary: Still worry about your insufficient Mac storage? Want to speed up Mac but don't know how? Get the 6 free Mac cleaners to clear disk space, clean junk or duplicate files to free up your Mac.
Many of us know exactly how to clean Windows computer or Android phone, but when it comes to cleaning Mac, few people know about it. Many Apple users think that, there is no need to clean Mac.
May 17, 2019 How to clean up Mac hard drive space? Here are few tips that would help you to unload your hard drive. Delete unnecessary apps and games. Most of us will have games, apps and other content that is no longer needed taking up hard drive space. Even Mac’s, with as much memory as some of them are equipped with, run out of space eventually. Easy and Free tutorial on how to free up your Mac's hard drive. Simple download and you're done! Download it here:.
However, with more and more junk files occupying your Mac storage, your Mac will slow down and offer a bad performance. You have to rely on some Mac cleaner software to remove all useless data.
Best Free Mac Cleaners
With so many Mac cleaner tools offered on the market, which one you should use? Do you know how to choose a great Mac cleaner? We have tested more than 20 Mac cleaners and select the 6 best ones for you to choose from. You can pick your preferred Free Mac cleaner to speed up your Mac easily and quickly.
No.1 Free Mac cleaner: CCleaner - Free junk file cleaner
CCleaner is one free and top Mac cleaner to delete cookies, search history, temporary files and junk files from Mac. The specific functions are below:
1. Find and remove useless/junk files with the click of a button so your Mac can run faster. Speed up boot times with easy management of Startup items.
2. Clear up your recycle bin, temporary files and folders, broken permissions and others. If you want to remove installed programs, just click one button.
3. Erase your browser search history and cookies so you can browse any Internet confidentially and your identity remains anonymous.
No.2 Free Mac cleaner: Disk Inventory X – Free disk cleaner for Mac
Disk Inventory X is one disk cleaning software and disk usage utility for Mac. With this free Mac cleaner, you can know where your disk space has gone and clean it safely. Just see more about Disk Inventory X.
1. Disk Inventory X shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way.
2. With this Mac cleaner, you can see different files marked with different colors, to help you easily find what you want to delete.
No.3 Free Mac cleaner: AVG Cleaner – Free hidden clutter cleaner
AVG Cleaner is one free Mac cleaner to clean hidden clutter and forgotten duplicates. You can see the detailed information below:
1. Clear more hidden garbage, log, download history and trash bin for freeing up more space on your Mac.
2. Search more duplicate files, including images, music, videos and folders.
3. Created for Mac and easy to use.
4. There is an anti-virus software called AVG AntiVirus for Mac, you can use it to protect Macs on your and your families.
No.4 Free Mac cleaner: OmniDiskSweeper - Free hard drive cleaner
OmniDiskSweeper is one free Mac cleaner to find and delete big files that taking up hard drive space and also it can help you recover lost disk space.
1. OmniDiskSweeper helps you sort every file on your Mac by size and you can identify the biggest file to delete it.
How To Clean Up A Mac Drive
2. After deleting, remaining space and folders are recalculated.
No.5 Free Mac cleaner: Dr. Cleaner – Free memory, disk, system cleaner
Dr. Cleaner is one free Mac cleaning app to offer Memory Optimization, Disk Cleaning and System Monitoring to keep your Mac optimized for the best performance.
1. Smart and accurate selection for duplicates scan and remove on Mac with OS X 10.6.6 or later.
2. Scanned big files and junk files will be deleted easily from your Mac.
3. You can easily view real-time network usage and CPU usage in the Menu bar.
No.6 Free Mac cleaner: Disk Drill
Disk Drill is one very popular free Mac cleaner app. Actually, it is a professional data recovery tool for Mac, which carries some disk cleaning functions. It has the capability to analyze Mac storage space, locate unused, large, and duplicate files and so on. In this way, it enables you to free up your Mac storage effortlessly.
1. Monitor the health of your Mac storage and offer timely alerts.
2. Find and remove duplicate files in multiple locations on Mac.
3. Analyze disk space, locate unused files and space hogs, free up storage.
Professional Mac cleaner recommendation:
With the best 6 Mac cleaner apps above, you can handily remove some junk files and optimize your Mac performance. But some of them only offer trial features. Here you are recommended to directly choose the professional Mac cleaner below:
Mac Cleaner- Scan and delete junk files including cache data and logs, email attachments, unwanted iTunes backup and app localization.
- Delete large and old documents and selectively remove worthless files.
- Clean duplicated files or folders on Mac.
- Uninstall apps and clean associated files safely.
- Monitor Mac system in disk utilization, battery status, memory performance and CPU usage.
- Compatible with iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook (Air/Pro) in the latest macOS Monterey.
FAQs of Free Mac Cleaner
How do I clean and optimize my Mac?
Download and install Aiseesoft Mac Cleaner. Click Cleaner and you can clean up your Mac by cleaning system junk, iPhoto junk, email junk, similar photos, iTunes junk, trash bin, large & old files and more.
Why is my Mac so slow?
The reason that why is your Mac so slow may includes there is no enough hard drive or RAM on Mac. Or there is too many startup items or icon clutter on desktop. Perhaps your macOS is outdated and you should update it.
Does Catalina slow down your Mac?
No. Catalina won’t slow down an old Mac. You can check to make sure if your Mac is compatible with macOS Catalina.
By now, 6 free Mac cleaners have been shared here. You can choose your preferred Mac cleaner according to your need. Please share it in comment if you have any better Mac cleaner recommendation. Check ere if you want to speed up your slow iPhone.
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December 29, 2020 17:50 / Updated by Louisa White to Mac Cleanup
Summary: this article is about how to clean your Mac hard drive so as to relieve startup disk space for better usage.
A full startup disk is something that every Mac users might experience. In such a case, you will see a 'Your startup disk is almost full' error message, with a vague note to delete some files in order to make more space available on the Mac. You see, deleting unnecessary files works on cleaning up Mac disk drive. But the answers of how to clean up Mac hard drive are never confined to this way. And in this article, we'd like to discuss top ways to clean up Mac hard drive and free up disc space on Mac computer.
Why Do You Clean Mac Hard Drive?
Actually a hard disk should never get beyond 85% capacity, especially a startup disk. And if you get an error message that your startup disk is almost full, you need to take measures to free up space immediately, or else you will experience slowness and even errors the further you get above that mark. Given that, you need to clean up Mac external drive to speed up your Mac and get rid of the possible error causing by overloaded drive.
How to Clean up Mac Hard Drive?
So how do you free up disk space on Mac? The same way you solve the problem of a packed fridge - you need to clear space, of course. For that purpose, you will need to:
#1 Check What is Taking up All of Your Disk Space
You should have a general understanding of what is taking up your disk space.
Simply click the Apple menu > select 'About This Mac' > click on the 'More Info' button > choose the 'Storage' tab to check the disk storage overview and capacity.
#2 Delete Unnecessary Files from Mac
Usually your Mac space goes insufficient mainly due to the large size files, which you may or may not delete but it still exist on your Mac. To solve how to clean Macbook Pro hard drive by deleting files from Mac, you can:
a. Empty your trash cans
Ctrl+click or right-click the Trash icon at the bottom-right corner of the dock and select Empty Trash. This will delete all the files you sent to the trash from the Finder.
BTW, Macs can actually have multiple trash cans, for example in iPhoto, iMovie, Mail etc, so you may need to empty several. For example, if you use iPhoto to manage your pictures and delete them in iPhoto, you'll have to clear the iPhoto trash to remove them from your external disk drive, just Ctrl+click or right-click the Trash option in that specific application and select Empty Trash.
b. Delete old iOS backups in iTunes
This is particularly relevant for old devices you may have backed up some time ago but no longer even own. You can choose iTunes > Preferences > Click Devices > Select the backup you want to remove > Click Delete Backup.
Also see: How to Free up Space on iCloud >>
c. Uninstall old Mac applications and app caches
If there are apps in there you can't remember installing, odds are you can live without them since they are not the best Mac apps indeed. Move them to the Trash to reclaim some hard-drive space. Click the Launchpad icon in the Dock, hold down an app's icon until all the icons begin to jiggle, then click an app's delete button .
d. Delete big, unused files
You can also delete huge files to clean up Mac hard drive as well. Open Finder and select the volume you'd like to search. Next, choose File > Find (or hit Command-F). Click on the Kind pull-down menu and select Other. When the Select a search attribute window opens, check the box for File Size, uncheck any other boxes, and click OK. Change the 'equals' pull-down menu option to 'is greater than' and then change KB to MB. Enter a minimum files file size such as, say, 100MB. You can then delete any files that show up on the list that you no longer need -- or move them to an external drive at the very least.
e. Clear temporary files
You are suggested to free up disk space on Mac by clearing temporary files such as browsers caches, internet history cookies, download history and so on. Take Safari caches as an example, you can clear the temporary caches to free up more space and get a faster performance on macOS Sierra/High Sierra etc.
- Click Safari in the upper left hand side of your screen. In the menu that appears, click Preferences.
- Click the Privacy tab. Click the button Remove All Website Data....
- Click Remove Now in the pop up window that appears.
Clean Up Mac Hard Drive Free Software
#3 Move files to portable drive or cloud storage
If you don't want to delete any files on your Mac computer, you can buy an external hard drive for Mac and then move files to it. Or you can also upload your files to cloud as well, for example upload Mac data to iCloud, transfer DVD to media server etc.
Move Files to External Hard Drive
- As you connect an portable hard drive to your Mac via USB cable, it will appear on the Devices menu in Finder.
- Select the folders or files you want to transfer onto your external hard drive. Hold down the 'Command' button to select multiple items simultaneously.
- Press 'Command-N' to open a second Finder window and then select your disk drive on the list of devices displayed under the Devices heading on the left side of this new window.
- Drag and drop folders and files from your Mac's Finder window into the external hard drive's window. A status bar appears on your screen indicating progress. Wait until the full transfer completes.
- Click the 'Eject' button to safely remove it when you're finished.
Move DVD Disc to External Hard Drive
Clean Macbook Pro Hard Drive
Watching DVD movies through external portable drive is a new trend these days since it won't take too much space on Mac's startup disk drive and you can reach your DVD resources on the go. So many Mac users choose to rip DVD to hard drive and build a digital DVD library with superb MacX DVD Ripper Pro.
It enables you to convert DVD to MP4, FLV, AVI, WMV, MOV, MPEG to USB drive with high quality, regardless of the latest DVD releases, Disney 99-title DVDs, TV series DVDs, workout DVDs etc.
Part 4: Replace your Mac hard drive with an SSD
Find Mac Hard Drive
I have a Macbook Pro with SSD of 500GB. My DVD drive is almost full, with music and movies. So I'm thinking of removing the optical drive and replacing it with a second drive of 1TB. - Dj AR1
I just performed the maneuver myself, replacing my 2011-era MacBook Pro's 500GB hard drive with the 500GB Samsung 850 EVO. The Samsung SSD and a SATA-to-USB cable kit cost me just north of $200 on Amazon. And the whole procedure took less than an hour. Really, the hardest part of the whole thing was tracking down a size 6T torx-head screwdriver for the four torx screws that help hold the disk drive in place.
Well, after you've checked the quick tips on how to clean Mac hard drive, you can have a try by yourself. And for average Mac users, you are suggested to delete files from Mac computer, move files to external portable drive and cloud. Of course, you are a tech, replacing a larger size SSD is also an efficient choice.
Rip and Save DVD to External Hard Drive Instead of Startup Disk
Clean Up Mac Hard Drive Free Download
MacX DVD Ripper Pro, a profesional DVD ripper to copy large size DVD to external drive instead of the startup disk so as to clean up Mac startup disk drive. It empowers you to convert DVD to MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV, MPEG-2 etc within 5 mins with 98% quality reserved.