Is your Mac out of space? Find out why it's low and how to free up more with Crucial’s guide on how to clear space on a Mac. Free download Disk Space Tab Disk Space Tab for Mac OS X. Disk Space Tab is a Menu Bar app that shows disk drive information.
If you’re getting error messages about a full disk, or having trouble downloading and installing new apps, it might be time to clear some space on your Mac.
Your storage drive has a finite amount of space on it. Some of that space is taken up by internal processes, some by the operating system, and the rest is reserved for programs, music, photos, files, movies, and anything else you’ve saved. Storage space is usually measured in gigabytes (GB).
To see how much space you have on your storage drive, follow these instructions:
- Click the Apple® menu
2. Select About this Mac, then Storage
The total size of the disk will be listed, along with how much free space remains on the disk. 20% free space is usually recommended to give the system plenty of room to exchange files with the memory module.
There are several steps to freeing up space on your storage disk.
Check your desktop and remove the shortcuts for any apps and files that you no longer use. Go to Software Update to permanently remove any apps from your storage disk.
To use Software Update, click the apple icon, then select App Store, where you can update or uninstall programs.
Check the Downloads folder. Make sure things you want are saved to the appropriate place on the storage disk, then delete the copy in the Downloads folder.
Go through your storage disk to delete files, programs, games, and music you no longer want. You can also move items you want to keep but rarely use to the cloud or to an external storage drive.
Delete any downloaded movies or TV shows that you’ve already watched. If you want to watch them again, they’re waiting for you on iTunes®.
Use the instructions below to remove duplicates of photos, documents, and music.
![Working Working](https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en_US/macos/monterey/macos-monterery-storage-management-recommendations.png)
- Select File on the main menu
- Select New Smart Folder, click the “+” sign on the right-hand side, then select search parameters such as File Extension under Other. You can then delete all but the most recent version.
If you have OS X® Sierra on your Mac, you can configure items to automatically move some items to iCloud. Select the Apple menu, then About this Mac, select Manage, then Storage Tools. Then select Store in iCloud. This option moves items off your storage drive and into your Apple account in the cloud.
There are other options in this area that will allow you to automatically clear space on your storage disk:
- Optimize Storage—this option deletes movies and TV shows purchased on iTunes and downloaded. If you want to see the item again, you can download it again.
- Empty Trash Automatically—this option permanently deletes items in the trash after 30 days.
- Reduce Clutter—this option helps you sift through your files to find which ones can be moved to other storage options, such as the cloud or an external drive.
Check Disk On Mac
If you’ve done all of these things and still don’t have enough room, consider upgrading your storage disk to a larger solid state drive. Browse our range of solid state drives.
Be sure to clear your browser’s cache files. If you’re using Safari, use this procedure:
- Open Safari, then select Preferences
- Select Advanced, then Show Develop Menu
- Click Check Develop Menu and Empty Caches.
Items you put in the trash stay there, taking up space until you empty the trash. Right-click on the trash icon and select Empty Trash. Some applications, such as iPhoto®, iMovie®, and Mail have their own trash cans, be sure to empty those as well by going into each program and selecting Empty Trash.
When you’ve completed all the tasks, restart or turn off your computer to clear the memory.
You’ve just freed up space on your Mac!
©2017 Micron Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Information, products, and/or specifications are subject to change without notice. Neither Crucial nor Micron Technology, Inc. is responsible for omissions or errors in typography or photography. Micron, the Micron logo, Crucial, and the Crucial logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Micron Technology, Inc. Mac, Apple, iTunes, OS X, iPhoto, and iMovie are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.
Active1 year, 4 months ago
When I am trying to build the docker image I am getting out of disk space error and after investigating I find the following:
How do I fix this out of space error?
Pritam Banerjee
Pritam BanerjeePritam Banerjee16.1k1010 gold badges7676 silver badges9696 bronze badges
3This will clean up all images, containers, networks, volumes not used. We generally try to clean up old images when creating a new one but you could also have this run as a scheduled task on your docker server every day.
Nick SpicerNick Spicer1,59922 gold badges1616 silver badges2222 bronze badges
2Find Disk Space On Mac
use command -
docker system prune -a
This will cleaned up total Reclaimable Size for Images, Network & Volume..... This will remove all images related reclaimable space which are not associated with any running container.....Run
docker system df
command to view Reclaimable memoryIn case there is some Reclaimable memory then if above command does not work in first go then run the same command twice then it should cleaned up.... I have been experiencing this behavior almost on daily basis.....Planning to report this bug to Docker Community but before that want to reproduce this bug with new release to see if this has been fixed or not with latest one....
Anshuman Goel64411 gold badge99 silver badges2424 bronze badges
Abhishek JainAbhishek Jain
3Open up the docker settings -> Resources -> Advanced and up the amount of Hard Drive space it can use under disk image size.
NicoNico
2If you are using linux, then most probably docker is filling up the directory
/var/lib/docker/containers
, because it is writing container logs to <CONTAINER_ID>-json.log
file under this directory. You can use the command cat /dev/null > <CONTAINER_ID>-json.log
to clear this file or you can set the maximum log file size be editing /etc/sysconfig/docker
. More information can be found in this RedHat documentation. In my case, I have created a crontab to clear the contents of the file every day at midnight. Hope this helps!NB:
- You can find the docker containers with ID using the following command
sudo docker ps --no-trunc
- You can check the size of the file using the command
du -sh $(docker inspect --format='{{.LogPath}}' CONTAINER_ID_FOUND_IN_LAST_STEP)
1,93066 gold badges3030 silver badges4444 bronze badges
Nothing works for me. I change the disk images max size in Docker Settings, and just after that it free huge size.
troger19Mac Out Of Disk Space
troger191,02922 gold badges1212 silver badges2525 bronze badges
2Going to leave this here since I couldn't find the answer.
Go to the Docker GUI -> Prefereces -> Reset -> Uninstall
Completely uninstall Docker.
Then install it fresh using this link
My docker was using 20GB of space when building an image, after fresh install, it uses 3-4GB max. Definitely helps!
Mac Run Out Of Disk Space
Also, if you using a macbook, have look at
~/Library/Containers/docker*
This folder for me was 60 GB and was eating up all the space on my mac! Even though this may not be relevant to the question, I believe it is vital for me to leave this here.
DUDANFDUDANF