When your hard disk becomes full, you can, of course, start deleting files and applications on your Mac. However, some programs have a lot of GB's on disk space without worrying about it. For example, major consumers include duplicate parts in iTunes, iMovie events, and temporary files from different applications.
Hard disks and SSDs are getting bigger, and so we often do not think so when we download or install something big. But at some point, your disk will be full. Let's see how to find out how much space on your drive is available in OS X and what takes up the most space.
Certain components of the operating system and some apps use in the free disk space background. For example, your Mac requires free space to control memory usage. OS offers free disk space on boot, even if you have enough RAM in your Mac. In addition, your mac (book) uses a smart automatic defragmentation method that requires disk space. Many apps also use free disk space for storing temporary files. Therefore, it's a good idea to keep around 15 percent of your hard disk capacity. An SSD disk may even need more free space to function properly, depending on the architecture of the disk.
How To Check Disk Space?
Go to the menu bar and click the Apple icon. Select About This Mac, click More Info, and navigate to the Storage tab.
Then you will see an overview of the storage on your system and external storage devices that are connected to your Mac. In this overview, you can see the total storage space per disk, used space, free space, and used space per file category. Each category has its own color. A percentage is difficult to determine, keeping a safe margin of 20 percent free space.
Freeing Space Using File Size Reducing Softwares
File size reducing software is highly useful for compressing files to take up less space. The best utility for Mac is B6Zip which supports B6Z archive format and allows faster file transfer by reducing file size. Smaller files mean that users can send more items through size restricted sharing services such as email. We have compiled an up to date review of the best compression software for macOS. This application earns its place in the spotlight for flexibility, reliability, speed, and features.
B6Zip is a popular compression software that has been around for several years. One of the common file compressors for the Mac platform, B6Zip supports the latest B6Z standard archive file format. B6Z is a powerful format that allows the compression of data at extremely high levels. B6Zip is the only official software package capable of producing and extracting B6Z files, though the open source nature and SDK means that other archive managers may also work with B6Z files. This format has been uniquely built to handle extreme file sizes of many millions of petabytes maximum. Another important aspect of B6Zip is that it supports many other formats such as ZIP, RAR, 7ZIP, GZIP, TAR, and many others.
Because many people are now interested in securing their files, B6Zip offers 256-bit encryption through the use of passphrases. This means that as long as a secure and hard to guess password is chosen, your files will be completely secure. One would expect these many features to come at a price, but B6Zip is completely free and is released under the GNU General Public License with source code available. This means that the B6Z standard will exist and continue to be supported for the foreseeable future.
Misty Jhones