As illustrated in this support article, select the Devices tab in the iTunes preferences window, select the backups you want to delete, and click Delete Backups. A common waste of space is old iTunes backups of mobile devices. See this support article for some simple ways to free up storage space. If you followed bad advice to disable local snapshots by running a shell command, you may have ended up with a lot of data in the Other category.

You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as Backups. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. When Time Machine backs up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. Available storage space that you'll never use is wasted space. There is little or no performance advantage to having more available space than the minimum Apple recommends. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of the data. That will temporarily free up some space.Īccording to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB of available space on the startup volume (as shown in the Finder Info window) for normal operation- not the mythical 10%, 15%, or any other percentage. If you use iPhoto, empty its internal Trash first:įile ▹ Show Recently Deleted ▹ Delete Allĭo the same in other applications, such as Aperture, that have an internal Trash feature. If the display seems to be inaccurate, try rebuilding the Spotlight index of the startup volume ('Macintosh HD,' unless you gave it a different name.)Įmpty the Trash if you haven't already done so. For information about the Other category in the Storage display, please see this support article.

How to clear macintosh hd space