My hard disc was almost full, so I was faced with a choice: buy more space or clean up. I chose to do a cleaning session and now have 40% free space. Here’s how I did it.
Clean up iTunes
Here I found the most potential. I stopped the syncing of podcasts with my iPhone and deleted all podcast episodes. I also deleted all synced iPhone apps, and backups of old devices. This alone saved 50+ GB.
A clean up with CleanMyMac
On Twitter [thank you Philippe] I was recommended to buy CleanMyMac. I did and it turned out to be a very useful piece of software. Helped me clean another 30+ GB. It found old junk such as old software updates that were never deleted. It helped me uninstall unused software and visualize which folders use how much space. It also has a useful updater, to auto-update all the software on your Mac.
Deleted duplicate files with Gemini
Then I bought Gemini, an intelligent duplicate file finder. It let me sort all duplicates by size. I then manually reviewed, and then deleted the largest 100-200 files out of the ~3000 files it found. This saved another 10+ GB.
General cleanup
I went through old folders and found lots of things worth deleting. As a bonus, I also deleted my old bookmark collection. I haven’t used it in years and many links were broken/outdated anyways.
My time investment was 4-5 hours. My Mac feels faster and has 200+ GB of free space. Mission accomplished!
