How to clean up your Mac

1. See what’s using the space

Open System Settings → General → Storage. The bar at the top splits your disk into Applications, Documents, Photos, iOS Files, macOS, System Data and so on, and the list below lets you open each one.

For a precise answer, ask Terminal which folders in your home are biggest:

du -sh ~/* ~/Library/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -20

The last lines are the largest. On most Macs, ~/Library and ~/Downloads are near the bottom, and for developers so is the folder their projects live in.

2. Empty the Trash

Deleted files still take up space until the Trash is emptied, which is why freeing space sometimes seems to do nothing. In the Finder choose Finder → Empty Trash, or press ⇧⌘⌫.

To stop it piling up again, open Finder → Settings → Advanced and turn on Remove items from the Trash after 30 days.

3. Clear app caches and logs

Apps keep caches in ~/Library/Caches so things load faster next time. Browsers, Spotify, Slack and messaging apps can each hold a gigabyte or more. Everything in there is safe to delete: apps rebuild what they need, at the cost of a slower first launch.

1. Quit the apps you can.
2. In the Finder, press ⇧⌘G and go to ~/Library/Caches.
3. Delete the folders inside it, not the Caches folder itself. Leave the folders starting with com.apple. to macOS.

To see which caches are biggest first:

du -sh ~/Library/Caches/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -15

Crash reports and diagnostic logs in ~/Library/Logs can go the same way.

4. Clean out Downloads

Downloads is where installers, zip files and one-off files collect for years. Open it in the Finder, switch to list view with ⌘2, and sort by Date Added or Size. Three kinds of file are usually safe to go:

• Disk images and installers (.dmg, .pkg) for apps you’ve already installed.
• Zip files sitting next to the folder they unzipped into. You have the contents twice.
• Anything you haven’t opened in months. Move it to the Trash rather than deleting it outright, in case you change your mind.

5. Find large files

In System Settings → General → Storage, click the ⓘ next to Documents and open Large Files. Or list every file over 1 GB in your home folder from Terminal:

find ~ -xdev -type f -size +1G -not -path "*/Library/*" 2>/dev/null

Old screen recordings, exported videos, virtual machine images and disk images are the usual finds. Only you can tell which are worth keeping, so check each one before you remove it.

6. Remove apps you don’t use

In the Storage settings, click the ⓘ next to Applications to see every app with its size. To remove one, drag it from the Applications folder to the Trash. Big apps you may have forgotten about include Xcode, GarageBand, older versions of Office, and games.

Some apps leave settings and data behind in ~/Library/Application Support, in a folder named after the app. Once the app is gone, that folder can go too.

7. Delete old iPhone and iPad backups

Each local backup of an iPhone or iPad can take tens of gigabytes, and backups of phones you no longer own never go away by themselves. In System Settings → General → Storage, click the ⓘ next to iOS Files to see them with their dates, and delete the ones you don’t need. Keep at least the latest backup of every device you still use, unless it backs up to iCloud.

8. Shrink System Data

System Data is the catch-all for everything macOS doesn’t put in another category: caches, logs, Time Machine local snapshots, virtual memory, and the data of developer tools like Xcode simulators and Docker. You can’t delete it as a whole, but you can shrink most of what’s in it.

• Caches and logs: see step 3.
• Time Machine local snapshots: list them with tmutil listlocalsnapshots /. macOS deletes them on its own when space runs low, but you can remove them now with sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /.
• Developer tools: see Xcode and Docker below.

Restarting your Mac also clears swap files and other temporary data, which can take System Data down by several gigabytes.

9. Delete node_modules and build folders

If you write code, this is usually the biggest win. Every JavaScript project keeps its dependencies in node_modules, often several hundred megabytes each. Rust projects keep build output in target, and Python projects keep a virtual environment in .venv. All of them come back with npm install, cargo build or pip install, so the copies in projects you aren’t working on are dead weight.

To list them with their sizes (change ~/code to wherever your projects live):

find ~/code -name node_modules -type d -prune -exec du -sh {} + 2>/dev/null | sort -h

Remove the ones you don’t need with rm -rf path/to/node_modules. Only delete a node_modules folder that sits next to a package.json, and a target folder next to a Cargo.toml; a folder with the same name somewhere else might be something you made.

10. Clear package manager caches

Package managers keep a copy of everything they have ever downloaded. Clearing these is safe; the next install just downloads again.

npm

npm cache clean --force

Yarn

yarn cache clean

pnpm

pnpm store prune

Bun

rm -rf ~/.bun/install/cache

pip

pip cache purge

uv

uv cache clean

Cargo

rm -rf ~/.cargo/registry/cache ~/.cargo/registry/src

Go

go clean -cache -modcache

Gradle

rm -rf ~/.gradle/caches

CocoaPods

pod cache clean --all

Homebrew

brew cleanup --prune=all and brew autoremove

Bun, pnpm and uv copy packages into your projects as APFS clones, which share storage with the cache. Clearing their cache frees less than its size suggests until the projects’ own copies are gone too.

11. Clean up Xcode

Xcode can quietly take 20 to 50 GB on top of its own size.

• DerivedData holds build products and indexes for every project you have built. Delete it with rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData; Xcode rebuilds it, and the next build is slower.
• Simulators for iOS versions you no longer have installed: xcrun simctl delete unavailable. Whole simulator runtimes are listed by xcrun simctl runtime list and can be removed in Xcode → Settings → Components.
• Device support files in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport are copied for every iOS version you have connected a device with. Folders for versions you no longer test on can go.
• Archives, in Window → Organizer, hold the debug symbols for builds you shipped. Keep the ones whose crash reports you still care about.

12. Clean up Docker

Docker keeps images, stopped containers and build cache inside one large disk image. See how much of it is reclaimable with docker system df, then:

docker system prune        # stopped containers, unused networks, dangling images, build cache
docker system prune -a     # …and every image no container is using

Volumes, where databases keep their data, are only removed if you add --volumes. Docker Desktop’s settings, under Resources, also let you cap how big its disk image can grow.

13. Let macOS keep it clean

Under System Settings → General → Storage, the recommendations can do some of this for you from now on:

• Store in iCloud keeps recent Desktop and Documents files on your Mac and the rest in iCloud.
• Optimize Storage removes Apple TV movies and shows you have already watched.
• Empty Trash Automatically deletes items that have been in the Trash for 30 days.

Photos has its own switch: in Photos → Settings → iCloud, choose Optimize Mac Storage to keep full-size originals in iCloud and smaller versions on your Mac.