It happens to all of us: after time, the disk space suddenly seems to have vanished – it’s time to do spring cleaning and help our Mac’s disk «breath» again.

For me, there’s one tool that helps me to get this job done quickly, visually appealing and reliable since many years & macOS versions: GrandPerspective! (Grab it here)

Back in the early days of Mac OS X there was «Disk Inventory X», but while it’s development stalled after 2005, I had to search for an alternative and ended up happily with GrandPerspective. It uses the same visual block-style to indicate large files and folders, and became my go to companion for spring cleaning my Mac’s drive.

Visually display large files and folders on your disk

With GrandPerspective you scan for example the entire Macintosh HD disk – or narrow it down to more specific folders like your user home. It’ll generate and easy readable map by total size of the contained data.

Example Report in GrandPerspective showing large files and folders

Of course it makes sense to start with inspecting the big blocks and decide, whether it’s something unused or unnecessary and can be deleted – freeing a big amount of space on your drive very quickly.

Common culprits of what is taking up a lot of disk space

Throughout the years I found the following general culprits in regards to taking up an unnecessary high amount of disk space on my Mac:

Application support files

~/Library/Application Support/
  • Mac App Store: ~/Library/Application Support/App Store
  • Spotify: ~/Library/Application Support/Spotify/PersistentCache
  • Microsoft Teams:
    • ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Teams/Cache
    • ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Teams/Service Worker/CacheStorage
  • (old) iTunes iPhone / iPad Software Updates: ~/Library/Application Support/iTunes/

Application cache files

~/Library/Caches/
  • Mac App Store cache: ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.appstore/
  • iMovie cache: ~/Library/Caches/iMovie/
  • Spotify music cache: ~/Library/Caches/com.spotify.client/
  • Telegram App updates:
    ~/Library/Caches/ru.keepcoder.Telegram/org.sparkle-project.Sparkle/
  • Google Chrome App updates: ~/Library/Caches/com.google.SoftwareUpdate/Downloads/
  • Firefox Profile cache: ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/[profile-id]/cache2/

Safari

  • Local Website Storage: ~/Library/Safari/LocalStorage

iMessage / Apple Messages

  • Attachments: ~/Library/Messages/Attachments

Application Sandboxes (Group Containers)

App specific user data, caches, logs, etc:

  • ~/Library/Group Containers/
  • and ~/Library/Containers/[Application Name]/Data/Library/

iCloud Drive files

  • Local copies: ~/Library/Mobile Documents
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1 thought on “Easily find and clean up large files and folders in macOS – common culprits”

  1. My largest files and folders are always my own, the ~/Library is dwarfed by comparison. While I have used GrandPerspective and Disk Inventory X, my favorite tool to this day is DaisyDisk.

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