In my case, "System" (meaning the operating system) was clearly using the most space. You'll be greeted with a color-coded categorization of what your disk is being used for.
To see if this method will help you reclaim some disk space we need to check the macOS System Information.Ĭlick the Storage tab. Determining if you have a large amount of "System" disk usage And instead of waiting for macOS to catch up with my disk space requirements, I can force the purging from the terminal. However, sometimes the purging doesn't happen to leave enough disk storage for my very large video files and I'll get a "not enough disk space" message. It also purges local backups if disk space starts to get too low. In fact, macOS High Sierra manages this disk usage seamlessly without user intervention. The reasoning behind this is that in the event the remote backup disk is not available or present, then you can recover files in spite of a missing remote backup disk and recover from the local disk. If you run Time Machine for backups over Wi-Fi like I do, then macOS High Sierra will simultaneous use your remote backup disk and your local disk to save backups to.
Size, then I see all of my files sorted into different tiers by file size, starting with 1GB to 10GB files at the top.Having to play around with large video files can be a headache when my system has a blazingly fast SSD drive but is only 500GB in size. When I click the Size header to sort by size, it doesn't show me all of my files, but if I click the gear icon at the top of the window and select Arrange By. I have found this is particularly useful for the Recents folder.
If you are looking to free up some space on your Mac, you can easily sort files of any Finder window by size. You can also highlight a file in Finder and use the keyboard shortcut Command-I to open the Get Info panel. In the top right of the Get Info panel, you'll see its size. Get Info panelįor any file or folder, you can quickly view its size by control-clicking it and selecting Get Info. At the bottom of the panel that pops up, check the box or Calculate all sizes. You can make the size of folders appear by opening a Finder window with folders in it, clicking View in the menu bar and then choosing Show View Options. You can also drag the headers to rearrange them.īonus tip: You might notice that the Size column is blank for any folders in the List view. You can then click on the Size header to order the list by size. If you don't see a Size column in your Finder window, you can add it by control-clicking on the headers that are visible - Kind, Date Last Opened and the like - and clicking Size.
List view is my favorite view in Finder because it offers the most information, including file size. Folders, too! Add Size column to List view in Finder Here are three ways you can check the size of files on your Mac. How big a file is that video you just recorded? How large are the files of those photos you just exported? There are any number of reasons to check the size of a file on your Mac - the most obvious being so you can free up space by rounding up the largest files and deleting or moving them.