I looked through the reformatted SSD and only saw one item missing: a 48 GB sync backup of my iPhone. This was cool.īut I googled this yesterday and read that case sensitive means that you have two file in the same folder with the same name! Some apps won’t work with case-sensitive APFS. Then in 1984 the Macintosh came out and you could use upper- and lower-case letters in file names, and anything length you wanted. I’d always assumed the case sensitive file names are a good thing, right? I remember when MS-DOS filenames were all UPPERCAS.TXT (eight letters maximum). While I was at it I reformatted the SSD as APFS without case sensitivity. An external 240GB SSD is under $30 and is more than enough space to back up a 256 GB SSD. This cleared half my SSD (128 GB)! It’s easy and fast if you buy an external SSD.

Use Time Machine to restore your data and apps.

Restart with command-r to bring up Recovery Mode.

Use Disk Utility to erase your internal SSD.

Use Time Machine to backup your internal SSD to an external SSD or HDD.

Then I found a better way to clear garbage files. Those 40GB were eaten up within a few months. I could have cleared more but as the files get smaller it takes more time to clear a gigabyte.

Someone could make an app that shows you each picture and you click up or down to save or delete it. I had 4GB of “Messages.” Every picture texted to or from my phone somehow was stored on my MacBook. You then have to delete the emails in the “Deleted Items” folder. Moving an email to “Deleted Items” doesn’t delete the email. In Microsoft Outlook I deleted 35,000 old spam emails. There were 25 versions of MongoDB, totaling 10GB. Updating some programs leaves the old versions. I listen to podcasts on my phone, never on my MacBook. I found that the Apple Podcast app had stored 6GB of old podcasts.

The 152GB of hidden files became visible.

My user account had 6.5GB of files but used 152GB of storage. I noticed that the folder sizes didn’t add up. These cleared a few gigabytes, but the space was soon filled again. I ran About This Mac > Storage > Manage> Optimize Storage. Its 256GB of memory was down to 9GB of free space. My MacBook Pro was running out of storage.

How to free up space on my macbook