# Freeing space on a Mac

> How I freed up space on my Mac using OmniDiskSweeper to find the biggest folders, then deleting Homebrew caches, leftover app data, and unused apps.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2025-04-17 | Topics: [Mac](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/mac/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/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](https://www.omnigroup.com/more), 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.