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.
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 I haven’t used it in years and many links were broken/outdated anyways.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!
