Tips For Managing Disk Space. What's your method?

[eva2000]

I'm a lifelong Windows user who moved to MacOS on a 14" Macbook Pro M4 Pro, 48GB, 1TB around 10 months ago. I just checked my disk usage, and I'm surprised I'm already down to 214GB of free disk space!

1. How are other folks managing and organising their disk usage/data on their Mac devices?
2. Any software or tools helpful in inspecting the disk space usage for planning where to save data, i.e. any tools for monitoring data/file access times to see when data was last accessed, so older, less frequently used data is highlighted as candidates for moving to external drives, etc?

I do have a USB4 external drive directly connected to one of the laptop's TB5 USB-C ports with a JEYI TB-2464 Pro Fan USB4 M.2 external enclosure + 2TB Kingston KC3000, split into two volumes: one for Time Machine and one for regular external files that I don't need on the internal disk, i.e., local AI LLM models that are downloaded.

I also have spare additional drives:

• 2x 2TB Kingston KC3000 NVMe
• 1x 4TB Lexar NM790 NVMe
• 16TB Western Digital Elements UBS3.0 external drive, which is formatted for NTFS for my Windows 10 laptop (haven't decided how I will deal with this for MacOS, as I need a dock or hub for USB-A and partitioned for NTFS volume for Windows 10 and APFS for MacOS?). I do have Paragon NTFS For Mac installed as well https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

I welcome any tips or advice

 

[maflynn]

Use external drives and cloud software to offload little used files/data.

I'd use something like OmniDiskSweeper to scan your drive, produce a sorted by size listing that you can then use to move or delete large files.

 

[gilby101]

1a. You do have lots of space consumed with apps. You may want to consider moving some of that elsewhere.
1b. A simple gain is to move your Documents elsewhere. Move the largest folders to another disk and symlink back to your home folder or ~/Documents.
1c. Need got consider backup for anything moved off the system disk.
1d. You also have quite a lot of System data. Try to find out what that is.
1e. You may find that some apps are using lots of space in ~/Library. That can be moved elsewhere and symlinked back to its location in ~/Library - but this is, perhaps, not for macOS beginners.

2a. The "storage" screens are very focused on abstract (and undocumented) categorisation of data. But any changes (moves) you make have to be by folder. To assist, you need something that will explore your disk by folder. Arguably the best (not free) is DaisyDisk. There are free apps that do something similar, but DaisyDisk makes the best stab at breaking down "System" and purgeable data - if you use DaisyDisk make sure you do scans "as administrator".
2b. I would not use frequency of access as my main criterion for moving. That is a recipe for confusing yourself over what is where. Keep macOS, its data and apps on the system disk, but anything else is fine to move to external SSD. If you are heavily into video or audio processing you may need to use a fast (e.g. Thunderbolt) SSD.
2c. Don't forget backup.

 

[throAU]

Stop being a pack-rat (he says)

to be fair I have ~500 GB of files there temporarily to do some video codec processing on. TLDR some people save 4k raw and red footage on the network and they don't need it in that quality, they just save in whatever format is off the camera. They're training videos they're literally just watching as is. Over the WAN.

 

[eva2000]

Arguably the best (not free) is DaisyDisk.

Thanks DaisyDisk was very useful in tracking down where disk consumption was

Identified some local disk folders in Documents I could move to external drive. I had 70GB Samsung Switch mobile data backup on internal disk, so updated app to store backups to external drive. I removed 89GB of Diffusionbee AI app model downloads. Guess disk free stats don't update right away or related to purgeable space https://daisydiskapp.com/guide/4/en/PurgeableSpace

 

[eva2000]

Force purged the purgeable space identified by DaisyDisk and free'd up some space too - seems it's partially the temp Timemachine snapshops so I guess they will re-fill the disk again.

 

[Fishrrman]

I have a 2024 m4 Mini (32gb RAM, 1tb SSD).

My personal guidelines (what works for me):
- Don't use time machine (no "snapshots"). I use CarbonCopyCloner for backups.
- Don't use spotlight (no "indexes"). I use EasyFind and Find Any File for searches.
- Turn off VM disk swapping (no swap files). I control the number of apps open at all times.
- Segregate user data from the OS files (I have my internal SSD partitioned 4 ways). I have a "boot" container (APFS), "main" (HFS+), "media" (HFS+), and "music" (HFS+) -- last three are "hard partitions" -- yes, you can do this on an m-series drive.

My drive space remains stable.
Even with the 4 volumes on the desktop, I still know where everything is (well, most of it, heh...)

 

[MayflyMaven]

Force purged the purgeable space identified by DaisyDisk and free'd up some space too - seems it's partially the temp Timemachine snapshops so I guess they will re-fill the disk again.

Time Machine snapshots can be a bit annoying when you're specifically trying to free up some space on your startup disk. They will be removed automatically once they're 24 hours old, but you can proactively delete those snapshots in Disk Utility. Select the "Data" volume in the sidebar, then choose "Show APFS Snapshots" from the View menu. The snapshots appear in the "APFS Snapshots" table at the bottom of the window, just select them and click the "-" button. It's safe to remove TM snapshots from the startup disk, that won't affect any backups.

 

[eva2000]

Time Machine snapshots can be a bit annoying when you're specifically trying to free up some space on your startup disk. They will be removed automatically once they're 24 hours old, but you can proactively delete those snapshots in Disk Utility.

Cheers thanks for that info. Didn't realise snapshots were on internal disk too, even if I have an external drive set for Time Machine backups!

How do folks with just a base 256GB disk on their MacOS devices handle that?

I have a 2024 m4 Mini (32gb RAM, 1tb SSD).

My personal guidelines (what works for me):
- Don't use time machine (no "snapshots"). I use CarbonCopyCloner for backups.
- Don't use spotlight (no "indexes"). I use EasyFind and Find Any File for searches.
- Turn off VM disk swapping (no swap files). I control the number of apps open at all times.
- Segregate user data from the OS files (I have my internal SSD partitioned 4 ways). I have a "boot" container (APFS), "main" (HFS+), "media" (HFS+), and "music" (HFS+) -- last three are "hard partitions" -- yes, you can do this on an m-series drive.

My drive space remains stable.
Even with the 4 volumes on the desktop, I still know where everything is (well, most of it, heh...)

Wow that's one way of handling things

 

[Fishrrman]

OP asks:
"How do folks with just a base 256GB disk on their MacOS devices handle that?"

You're not going to like this answer.

You "handle that" by buying a drive that is sufficiently large enough for your needs at the time of original purchase.

But... you're not the only one with this problem. There are, and will be, many many more in the days to come -- particularly those who bought the m4 Mini "base" models...