Sorry if this has been answered already, but I don’t have a Containers folder in the boot disk Library. I’m running the latest version of Sonoma on my 2019 iMac.
Start with your own movies and GIFs, just because one of those can be bigger than 100 photos or documents.
Get in the habit of running movies through HandBrake with “Web optimized” checked (unless, of course, you’ll want them on a larger screen someday.)
It’s not in the /Library folder of the boot disk - it’s in the Library folder of the user’s home folder. So in the Finder click on the “Go” menu, the hold down the option key - this should expose the “Library” folder item in the Go menu. Click “Library” and you will find the “Containers” folder there.
The “~” is a shortcut for the user’s home folder. If your user name is “Joe”, then “~” is a shortcut for “/users/Joe”.
Thanks. I should have known to look in my user Library, but no com.apple.mail in Containers there, although there are six Mail folders with Data folders containing aliases to the Downloads folder at the root of my username.
I’d argue that if you plan on keeping movies around (and don’t want to just download/stream them on demand), you should move them to external storage. Just about any HDD will be fast enough for movie playback. So why keep them on your Mac’s internal SSD?
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Definitely. We all formed bad habits when we got 1TB of storage, a couple of years back when that seemed like a lot.
Grand Perspective is free and wonderful as a first cut. I tried Daisy Disk a few times, but compared to Grand Perspective the circular view didn’t make sense to me.
A strong suggestion: before any cleanup, have at least two backups, done with different software (redundancy in all things.)
How do you determine free space on APFS? Depending on how you ask the system, you can get wildly different results. (I haven’t yet had this problem fortunately since my catalina mac is low usage and my primary sierra mac tells the truth.)
Explainer: Disk free space
I only bother with low hanging fruit, i.e. big stuff. Disk space is cheap, time is valuable. If internal drive space is tight, an external and/or archive drive is invaluable. It’s also useful if you need to temporally clear up enough space for something big. You do need to make sure it’s included in the backup plan.
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“Free space” is a fuzzy concept these days, due to the fact that you can have multiple files sharing storage, multiple volumes (in a single container) share a single pool of free space, and macOS can auto-delete certain kinds of files, depending on system settings.
As the article you cite mentioned, some important facts are:
- DIsk Utility will report the amount of storage that is not used by anything. This is closest to the classic concept of “free space” that we got used to in the past.
- If there are multiple volumes sharing an APFS container, they share the same pool of free space. So writing a file to one reduces the free space on the others.
- Various features (hard links and copy-on-write semantics and sparse files) mean that two files can share the same storage, and a file’s actual storage consumption may be less than its reported size. So a naïve utility trying to add up the size of all your files can easily come up with a bad count.
- If you have sparse or copy-on-write files, then writing to a part of the file that already exists can result in allocation of more storage, even though the file size didn’t change.
- Snapshots muck-up the math a bit more
- If a file belongs to a snapshot, then deleting the file won’t cause its storage to be freed until every snapshot referencing it is also deleted.
- Although a snapshot’s “size” is the size of all the files contained within it, deleting a snapshot will not free up that much storage, because most of its data will be shared with other snapshots and with the live file system. Deleting a snapshot will only free up the size of files that aren’t referenced anywhere else.
- Finally, the Finder reports “purgeable” storage. These are files that the system believes it can automatically delete in order to make more free space available. These are typically files that can be auto-downloaded or reconstructed when the files are needed again, and may include (depending on system configuration):
- Content purchased from the Apple Music/Movies/Books store (can be reloaded from the store)
- Content stored in your iCloud account
- System temporary files - especially caches
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A question: I’m trying out DaisyDisk. I see there are lots of temporary files in Containers related to Intego Virus Barrier Scanner - 28GB worth. All are 130MB each, and are presumably old virus definitions or old scan results. May I delete them?
Later: yes I can. Just does a full scan, not just changed files.
Any idea where the Photos library is kept on Catalina? I can’t find it in ~/Library. It may be in there but I can’t seem to locate it. Oh, never mind. Found it easily using the Photos app Preferences.
Photos creates a “bundle” file (a directory tree made to appear as a single file) with a photoslibrary filename extension. The default library is called Photos Library.photoslibrary and is located in the “Photos” folder in your home directory.
But you could create additional libraries and/or move/rename the existing library.
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David, thank you for your reply.
I think that if the developer is touting an “uninstaller,” the uninstaller should delete every remnant.
If a user took the time to launch the uninstaller, then the developer should ASSUME that the user wants to uninstall his or her app.
I am not against this option (I’ve seen a few (not many) apps where the uninstaller asks if you want to preserve preferences and settings or do a complete wipe. I wish we could see more of this.).
My complaint with uninstaller apps is that nearly all do not remove the small hard-to-find files that the installer loads at the root level.
Maybe the answer is the “sand box” but universal adoption of all apps being Sandboxed is also a pie in the sky dream.
Thanks for sharing.
Lee
Sure, but that term doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody.
As I wrote, some people uninstall an app with the intention of reinstalling it later. For example, to free up storage space prior to a system upgrade, after which they will reinstall. It wouldn’t be very nice to force the user to manually reconfigure all of his preferences afterward.
And some uninstall an app because they don’t ever want to use it again and want to remove every shred of its existence. Which, I assume, is what you believe should be what developers should assume, even though it would really aggravate users in the first category.
As for sandboxing, that comes “for free” with the App Store. I think everything you buy there (at least today) is installed that way. Of course, there’s a lot of great apps that aren’t available through the App Store so if you want to force yourself to go that route for everything, you’ll be missing out on some very useful software.
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Concerning uninstalling apps, there is at least one more subtlety:
Understanding the concept of app families, such as the audio apps produced by Rogue Amoeba, is crucial for uninstalling. These families often share common support files. If you’ve installed only one member and wish to uninstall it completely, you’ll also need to remove those common files. However, if you have several members and want to uninstall one, you should leave the common files intact. A developer-provided uninstaller should handle these scenarios seamlessly. However, if you’re using a 3rd-party tool like CMM, caution is advised.
I do uninstall apps using CMM, but I don’t do it mindlessly. I inspect the list of items to be uninstalled, and if I have doubts about any of them, I leave the problematical items alone.
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As others have pointed out macOS does not give a consistent measure of “free” space. According to Finder I have 570Gb free on my mac Mini drive. However, Disk Utility tells me there is less than 290Gb free. If I switch to another user I now have 320Gb. In fact the ‘right’ answer is 320Gb. The difference between the users is a large folder of audiobooks held in the Books app. I have no idea why this is not counted correctly.
I sync a few audiobooks at a time via Finder to my iPhone. When I looked in Library > Containers > Books > Data > tmp I found several Gb of books that I had previously synced and then deleted from the iPhone. More wasted space.
The Finder includes “purgeable” storage. I assume those audiobooks were purchased from Apple’s Books store. So if the system runs out of space, it can evict those files from your drive, freeing up more space, and then re-download them the next time you want to use one.
I believe purgeable also includes space consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be deleted if needed to make more free space.
Disk Utility is reporting the actual amount of free space - the number of disk blocks in the APFS container not used by any file or snapshot. Finder combines that with what it can delete in the background to make additional space available. But that data will vary by user, since it can’t delete files belonging to other users (and it can’t know if the files even can be deleted, because those users’ Apple IDs are not logged in).
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Howard Oakley has a thorough analysis of macOS free space on his Eclectic Light Company site and makes these points also.
However, in my case the books are not from Apple but many other sources. Further, from time to time in a way I cannot reproduce, Finder changes the free space count from the 570Gb level down to 320Gb but switches back after Sleep.
Anyway, I buried the lede. The relevant point is that there might be substantial removable space in Library > Containers > Books > Data > tmp
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Don’t forget about old messages. Especially those containing photo or video attachments.
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