Best Cleaner 2016 Pcmag Upgrade The Internal

You can upgrade the internal drive on some older Macs, but most of Apples modern offerings solder the storage onto the motherboard.

Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the menu bar and choose About This Mac.

If that overview says youre running macOS 10.12 Sierra or higher, then you can merely click the Storage tab to get a basic idea of whats taking up so much space on your drivelike documents, photos, music, and so on.

If you discover you have 100GB of music on a 128GB drive, for example, then its a fair bet you should clean up that iTunes library.

The left sidebar shows you each of the aforementioned categories, and you can click on them to see the biggest files of that type.

For example, you may find that you have multiple gigabytes of video from an old project you no longer need, or huge iOS backups from devices you no longer own.

Right-click any of these files to delete them, and you should be able to free up a decent amount of space.

Just dont forget to empty the Trash when youre doneif files are in the Trash, theyre still taking up space on your Mac) If you dont have macOS Sierra, or you want to drill down even further into your system, you can accomplish similar things with a tool like Disk Inventory X.

It may not be the prettiest disk space analyzer available for macOS, but its free and offers an exhaustive list of which folders, files, and file types are hogging your hard drive.

For example, macOS can automatically remove iTunes movies and shows youve already watched (while keeping them re-downloadable for later).

You can also choose to store documents, photos, andor messages in iCloud instead of on your computer.

Youll likely need to buy iCloud storage for this feature to be useful, though.

If you use another cloud syncing service, like Dropbox, open its settings and make sure youre only syncing the folders you need.

Theyll still be available from Dropbox.com if you need them, but they wont take up space on your computer.

Deleting these duplicates can help free up space, especially if there are a lot of them.

The best way to find duplicate files is with a third-party app like Gemini 2.

Best Cleaner 2016 Pcmag Trial Should Be

Its rather expensive for a full license, but the free trial should be all you need for a quick duplicate searchjust run the scan, and click the drop-down arrows next to each of the results to see which files are actually duplicates you can delete.

We recommend the latter anyway, so you dont accidentally delete something you need.

Many people advocate clearing these caches occasionally to free up space, but unlike the above tricks, clearing temporary files only helps you.well, temporarily.

Those caches will fill right back up as you continue using your computer, so this is only worthwhile if youre extremely low on space and just need to get by for a few days while you finish that large project, or wait for a bigger hard drive in the mail.

CCleaner is a free program that will scan your system for temporary internet files, system logs, and other unnecessary files.

Install the app, open it up, and click the Analyze button in the bottom-right corner.

Itll present you with a list of removable files, and you can click Run Cleaner to delete them.

If you want something more thorough, CleanMyMac X was able to find even more deletable files on my system, but it costs 35 for a one-year license.

Best Free Mac Cleaner 2016 Pcmag