Freeing space on a Mac
I filled almost all my MacBook’s hard drive.
The plan is to get a bigger hard drive soon when I’ll upgrade the MacBook with a more recent model, but in the meantime, I tried to drop all the useless stuff that it’s hiding somewhere.
I installed the app OmniDiskSweeper, which is freely available. This tool is interesting because it gives you more knowledge about what’s installed on your system. Many similar ones exist.
After a while (it has to lookup all the files in the hard drive), it’ll tell you the folders that have the biggest size on disk, and you can start inspecting.
I deleted some things like
- Homebrew packages, it had tons of caches and also stuff I installed who knows when, that I don’t use anymore
- Folders created by apps I uninstalled
- Cache files created by my video editing tools
And I found out some apps I downloaded had used lots more resources than what their bundle icon in /Applications says.
Forgotten apps: I deleted a few digital synthesizers I had installed in the past and don’t use anymore.
I also found out a mostly unused AI image generator app is using a ton of space for models, caches, etc.
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