In the last decade the capacity of hard drives got bigger and bigger while at the same time the prices went down. Many Mac users probably had more available free space than they knew what to do with it, but even so some people still have problems with available room on a HDD. This is understandable taking into consideration that in the recent years more digital media has become available so now lots of people are storing large video files as well as thousands of tracks and photos.
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We should also note that recent Macbooks have started utilizing solid state drives (SSD) which although are significantly faster than a conventional hard drive, these come in small capacities, up to 256GB or even 512GB so there isn’t a lot of room to store files. What can you do to make more room on your HDD/SSD? Keep on reading to find out.
First and foremost, you might want to clear out the downloads that you have previously made. You should know that each time you open a PDF file or a photo in an e-mail message while using Apple’s Mail, that file is going to be saved on a folder on your computer named Mail Downloads. If you don’t get a lot of attachments in the e-mail that you receive, this folder is going to remain small, but if you do a lot of file exchanging, it will shortly occupy a lot of space on the computer’s hard drive. The good news is that you have the possibility to empty this folder right away but first you’ll have to localize it. To do this access Finder and the click on Go > Go To Folder. Once you get there you will have to write ~/Library/Mail Downloads and then select all of the files in the folder and then move the batch to Trash. Similarly, you probably have various content that you have downloaded from the Internet which you don’t need anymore. You can find these files in the folder called Downloads which can be found in your home folder.
Over the years, media libraries have the tendency to accumulate but if you choose to use the iTunes Match service provided by Apple you are able to save a lot of disk space. If you get an iTunes Match subscription you will be able to store your favorite music in the cloud so from there on you can stream those tracks to your computer, as well as any other device running on iOS that you have which has been configured with the account. After you are done with matching the music library, you will probably want to delete the local copies of the songs. This is a very easy process as all that you will have to do is select all of the songs and then press the Delete key. Apple’s iTunes is going to confirm you that you plan on removing these files and after that it will ask you if you want them removed from the hard drive. Once you click on Move to Trash these files will be deleted, but they’ll remain in the library.In part two we’ll talk about other ways of increasing disk space on your Mac.