How To Clear System Storage On Mac

Macs are powerful machines with almost no limits on how much data you can store. External storage like hard drives, SD cards, and other flash media are great options to increase your Mac’s storage capacity. They are also the go-to locations for many users who need to free up space and optimize their local storage. The system storage on Mac is where everything related to OS X and its extensions goes. When it comes to freeing up space or troubleshooting another issue, it’s usually good to know where everything is stored. Overall, there is not much of a process for how to clear system storage on Mac but more of a series of steps that will lead you through the entire process.

How To Clear System Storage On Mac

1. Open Finder and look for System Preferences.
2. Click on the “Storage” tab and click on “Empty Trash”.
3. When prompted, click “Empty Trash” and then confirm the action.
4. Restart your Mac to have it flush all the data from the system storage to the hard drive or SSD. The process may take a few minutes, so be patient and wait for it to finish before closing down your Mac completely and moving on to step 5 below.
5. Open up Disk Utility from Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.

How To Find Out Where OS X & Apps Are Stored

• Quit all the apps you are running and close all the windows.
• Hold down the Option key on your keyboard, then click on Go To Folder in the menu that appears. The Go-To folder is located at the top left of your screen.
• In this folder, type into Terminal and press Enter key to open a terminal window: cd /. The command will take you to your computer’s root directory, which is where everything related to OS X and its extensions goes. You can also type cd /Volumes/Macintosh HD/. It might be a good idea for you to check out an article on how to find out where OS X & Apps are stored in Mac OS X if you’re not sure what I mean by this step here.
• Now that you’ve reached your root directory, type into a terminal window: ls -al and press Enter key on your keyboard when done typing. This command will list all the files and folders on your Mac.
• The next step here is to find out where OS X & Apps are stored in Mac OS X. Type into a terminal window: ls -al | grep / and press Enter key on your keyboard when done typing. The command will list all files that are located in the root directory, including all the folders, subfolders, and files located inside them. You will see a list of all the files that are present inside each folder, but you need to make sure that you type in exactly what it says here: “grep /” should be followed by “/” and not “grep |” or any other variation of this command.

How To Clear App Data

How To Turn Off Mac System Storage

Turn off your Mac completely, not just the lid — press and hold the power button for 10 secs or so. You can leave it unplugged from a wall outlet for 3-dozes pretty much take anything you wish. Restarting the machine after turning it off usually does not clear system storage — doing that is exactly what you are doing by restarting it! But powered down means undamaged, so eventually, it can be fixed at some point when your Mac is working again.

Start-Up From OS X Recovery Startup Drive

Boot up from the firmware or recovery drive that comes with your Mac if you have one. You can find these drives either on a hard drive installed in your separate RAID or attached to (or shared) your system through the Sharing option in File Explorer. This should do the trick even if the system isn’t all that clean already — Apple recommends this in case something gets broken but you don’t have access to a regular installation drive.

Turn Off FileVault

FileVault encrypts your entire Mac’s internal storage — that means after doing this you can no longer find/unlock your files, as there is nothing stored away in the numeric representation name EXCEPT encrypting the happenings on your PCB. The key is to turn it down before trying to restart your system — usually, that involves pressing shift-option-F9 whenever you are going to restart and when the usual language bar appears with System Preferences > Sharing options (to uncheck “Share my Mac ID” or something similar) has a green “Restart Computer” button at the bottom right of its window.

Clean Up Mac Registry Controls

Sometimes FileVault’s little scanner will not show you anything installed, figuring in since “nothing can be found!” Which of course just means there is something currently out of the clear getting onto your system given the unknown name and even longer keyboard commands to get into applications. Whatever this is, we don’t want that! Clean it all up and make sure everything works exactly as it used to on file created/created at Jelly Deals after doing this, pray for some help from Apple along with their affiliate companies should you need further troubleshooting.

How To Clear OS X Data

• To begin the process, let’s delete all unwanted apps and files. If you are concerned that your Mac might have private storage (You don’t want to do this), check to make sure your Mac OS X is up-to-date. To see what version of OS X you are running, open the App Store from inside Finder and then select About This Mac in the bottom App tab of Preferences. If it says “OS X 10.9 Mavericks” or higher, then you’re good for now.
• To start the clean-up process of this hidden but very crucial storage space, open a new Finder window and select Go > Home >> Documents Folder Inside the users’ home folder, there will be a lot of types of files and folders not recognized by OS X; these files shown can be safely removed as they appear in front of us while opening them, these are stored bits used by OS X 10 Boot Camp needs 3 GB of GPU memory and Virtual Memory Kext needs 4GB, ask your BootCamp performance difference.
• Delete all these files by opening the shell and clicking the Documents folder. Once that is deleted, open another search for this folder under Users > Mac User > Favorites like a shortcut. These network settings are unimportant to Mac users.
• Find the Photos library located in Users > Mac User -> Photo Library in the home folder (this file type can only be accessed by users with a newer machine or by professionals with Lightroom with Creative Cloud installations). Double-click, it or right-click on it, and choose “Get Info”. By default, photos and videos, 640 x 480 size and 30fps are not accepted. In accordance with your newly found setting snapshot which was defined? The setting snapshot is text but didn’t know it.
• Select the Library profile folder here and delete as many files matching images containing people’s faces and other personal details until you can see a few blank spaces on your desktop computer. Delete any downloaded videos, music, apps, etc., and sets the PC to sleep when no one is using it. This move prevents some phones from getting damp or wet. In order to make a safe deletion, it needs to uncheck both the Photo Stream Mac App and Documents from iCloud from this section to avoid the system restoring these folders automatically. 

5 Tips To Free Up Space Even Further

1. Let’s start with a tech tip, many do not know but clearing system storage on Mac is actually pretty easy to do. If you open up your Mac and then click on the trackpad and click tracks, documents, the items in the sidebar, and so on, you will quickly see how much space you are taking up by clicking this freakishly adorable icon and then opening your file issues in Finder. Short of deleting your OS drive where everything should go after a deep cleaning of this folder by following this
2. If that does not work for you, there is also a command line here is something to try: mount -UW / See the image on macrumors.com if you want a new disk image where everything gets organized so finds it once again becomes easier than digging around >o<
3. Do not be surprised if simply deleting things by dragging them off into purgatory does not work either. You need to reinstall things to make this all just right (osu!?) >o< You should also not be surprised if Mac’s highly superior operating system software still recognizes all its space even if everything is just a bunch of half-finished files but not the actual data they refer to. Something like this
4. There is not a lot you can do to clear system storage on Mac unless you have help from the experts, or in a fresh install like if you have just added memory or replaced the storage on your brand new Mac. If you are lucky to get this, then again here look for something that might at least take out things like Apple’s installation files and other so-called junk.
5. Everything obviously works after everything is super clean such as having reinstalled OS X by rebooting the day while cleaning stuff >o< >o< All gone. If you do not need those files anymore (whose operating system do they bother people who don’t use OS X now? The ones that hover over it in animations? I rest my case) but still if they took up space then maybe it is good to leave them at least until things can reboot cleanly also no backlash issues by resecuring every little thing back (I recommend another alarm clock). One way from experts like this. Maybe to prove a point, says it works perfectly fine after surgery. Many like a more invasive approach like this

Conclusion

The system storage on Mac is where everything related to OS X and its extensions goes. The best way to clear this space is to navigate to the system folders to find the data in question and delete it. When you clear the system data, you can free up space on your Mac and make it run faster. To do this, you can find out where the OS X and system apps are stored, clear app data, clear OS X data, or clean up your Desktop and backups. Keeping your Mac clean will make it run faster and last longer.