What to do if your Mac boot disk is full

1. Exit and re-open the application

Many other applications like Safari, Chrome, Photoshop, and so on, create a lot of temporary cache files at run time. If you haven't exited these applications for a long time, these cached files will continue to grow, and they are generally not purged (until the application exits).

Of course you can also delete the cache files manually, but it's easier to re-open the application. Let the application help you deal with it, why not? This method is especially useful for browser applications.

2. Restart your MAC, install system updates

Although we rarely restart Mac computers, I would like to point out that restarting the Mac computer can free up considerable free space on the disk. Restarting the MAC computer can refresh the system cache, clean up some application caches, install system updates, and perhaps more significantly, clear both: virtual memory swap files (swapfile) and sleep image files (sleepimage). If you rarely restart your Mac computer, both of these can become very large. When a MAC computer restarts, these two files will be cleared, and in the following example, these two temporary files occupy up to a few gigabytes of disk space.

So it's a good idea to restart the MAC after a period of time, even if it's only once in one months. You can also install OS X updates. When it comes to system updates, if you've already downloaded them, but haven't installed them, they're just sitting there taking up disk space on your Mac. These system updates are small, hundreds of MB, and a few gigabytes in size. So restart your MAC computer regularly to retrieve the disk space and install the update.

3. Clean up the Downloads folder

The "Downloads" folder is "notorious". I usually don't care about it, and after a while, there will be a lot of things in this folder. Go to your corresponding folder (~/downloads directory), sort the files by the size of the disk space, and then delete the files you don't need.

So you want Mac users to develop a good habit: Manage the Downloads folder. Generally, after installing the application, delete the installed. dmg file, delete the original compressed file when the unzipped file is finished, and regularly archive the usual files.

4. Empty the Trash

It sounds obvious, right? But it's easy to forget. The trash is "growing" after a while, and sometimes the hard disk drive of a MAC computer is running out of space just because a lot of stuff is being moved to the trash, but in fact, these things still exist on your disk. If you rarely empty the trash, right-click on the Trash icon and select "Empty Trash".

5. Use "Cleanmymac" software to clean up space

Cleanmymac is a very famous Mac Disk Cleanup software, can help you to automatically scan your Mac, to clean up the user cache files, system cache files, system log files and other system garbage, it can also help you to find large files and infrequently used files in the machine, According to your intention to perform the delete operation, Cleanmymac comes with the utility of which the uninstaller function is also very practical, can help Mac users completely uninstall unwanted applications, not residue, more efficient free disk space, this article at the end of the Cleanmymac to add the site download address, Welcome everyone to download and use!