Is your Mac running out of storage space? It happens -- especially if you've purchased a laptop with a smaller internal drive.
When you find yourself in such a situation, what do you do? You could try clearing your browser data, but that won't always get back much space.
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Fortunately, there are things you can do to clear up considerable space. I've had instances where I've regained nearly 30 GB, which makes a huge difference.
That said, let's get to the different ways you can clear system data on MacOS.
How to clear system data on MacOS
Clear system cache
The system cache is where you'll reclaim the most storage (especially if you've been using your Mac for a while).
1. Open Finder
Open Finder and then click Go in the menu bar. From the drop-down menu, select Go to Folder.
2. Navigate to Caches
When prompted in the pop-up, type ~/Library/Caches and hit Enter on your keyboard.
3. Delete it all
In the ~/Library/Caches folder, select all of the sub-folders (Command+A), right-click (or two-finger tap) one of the selected folders, and click "Move to Trash" to delete them. After you've done that, make sure to empty your Trash.
When I emptied that folder, it deleted nearly 400,000 items, so you can be sure I reclaimed a lot of space. Of course, I hadn't emptied that folder in a long time.
Clear system logs
The next step is to clear system logs, which can also take up more space than you might think. Here's how this is done.
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1. Open Finder
Once again, open Finder, click Go, and select Go to Folder.
2. Navigate to log
In the resulting pop-up, type /var/log/ and hit Enter.
3. Delete it all
Select all the files inside the Log folder (Command+A), right-click (or two-finger tap) one of the files, and then click "Move to Trash." In order for the action to complete, you will be prompted for your user password. Type the password (or user biometrics), and the files will be sent to Trash. Make sure to empty the trash to delete everything.
Remove unused language files
If you've added extra language files and no longer use them, you can repeat a similar action by going to /Library/Languages and deleting only the language folders you don't need.
Uninstall unused apps
Finally, you can reclaim a bit more space by going to the Applications folder and deleting the apps you no longer use.
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After you've taken care of the steps above, you should have reclaimed a good amount of internal storage space on your Mac.
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