Need to free up space

[skaertus]

I have a 13-inch 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar running High Sierra. Half of my 512 GB SSD is allocated to macOS (and the other half for Windows on BootCamp). There is 256 GB available in total, and I have only 6 GB of free disk space, which is causing some slowdowns (and I cannot even update to Mojave because there is not enough space).

I already erased all the unnecessary apps and files, but I still have too little disk available. I downloaded OmniDisk Sweeper and it tells me that 195 GB are being consumed by the users folder. Out of that, the Library consumes 178 GB, the largest folder being Group Containers (131 GB). Nearly all of that is allocated to Outlook: 62.5 GB of message attachments, 44.3 GB of message sources, and 22.5 GB of messages. That is the bulk of files that is taking my SSD.

Now, I cannot identify which files/folders relate to each message or account. I am not willing to simply erase these files, as some of them relate to Outlook accounts which I no longer have access to. How do I free disk space without erasing valuable data?

Thanks.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Out of that, the Library consumes 178 GB, the largest folder being Group Containers (131 GB). Nearly all of that is allocated to Outlook: 62.5 GB of message attachments, 44.3 GB of message sources, and 22.5 GB of messages. That is the bulk of files that is taking my SSD."

You're just going to have to "go in" and clean out those old messages and attachments.
There's no other way, you're not going to find one.
Do you really REALLY need to keep that stuff around?

You might consider archiving it to an external USB drive.

 

[Brian33]

I don't know Outlook at all, but in Apple's Mail.app you can display a Size column for the email list. Then you can sort by largest first to see the most useful emails to potentially delete. I'll bet most of that space is taken up by email attachments like photos and (especially) videos.