We have repeatedly raised the topic of clearing junk from our Macs. Today, once again, we’ll talk about a scenario where you need to do  a deep cleaning of your Mac to free gigabytes of Disk Space.

We all love to do things that clutter our Mac. First, we save everything to the desktop (pictures, movies, work files, links, copies of documents, and more). As the desktop gets cluttered and there is no more space for further storage, we begin to create folders. When there is no more room for folders, we hide a folder in a folder, and on and on it goes. Although, not for too long. Sooner or later there is no more disk space left on your Mac, and you start to panic. Worst of all, it can cause your Mac to start running slowly and slow down your workflow, and no one needs that.

Now imagine how much necessary information can be located in an infinite number of folders, how often you use this information and, most importantly, how much extra space it can take up by its useless existence.

Finding old and large files

When the time comes, and your Mac will simply cease to store new data, because the hard drive is full, you will finally have to do a cleanup on your Mac.

We start by removing old and useless files. How? Manually. We set aside a day off when we begin to sort through all the old folders to check video files, find some movies downloaded 2 years ago …

Let us try to streamline all of these activities and organize them more productively.

We suggest you start with downloads and the desktop. There is no doubt that you will find unused old files there: applications, movies, downloaded music, etc, all of which you have long forgotten. They need to be removed from the Mac, as well as from Trash, so that they do not take up disk space. If you still do not want to part with old photos or music, there is a solution. We recommend that you record them on an external drive, then remove them from your Mac.

After that, we recommend to carefully review the entire list in Applications, preferably to sort them by date last opened, and delete the applications that you have not opened in the last 6 months, because why keep them?…

I doubt that there are many people among us who will sacrifice a weekend to dig into the bowels of their Mac and spend time reviewing old files to free up disk space.

If you do not want to waste time on nonsense and kill a weekend doing it, there is another option. Take an external drive and just copy all the data to it, and then remove everything from the Mac, and it will be ready to get cluttered again. You won’t have to sort through all the junk that your Mac stores. If necessary, you will simply take out the flash drive or external drive and look for the files you need there.

There are many applications that will simplify, as well as speed up the process.

Let’s take a look at one of the most effective ways of quick and thorough detection of old, useless, and large files with the help of our old friend, CleanMyMac 3.

Locating old data with CleanMyMac 3

Let’s begin!

We will start by telling you about processing large files—50 MB and up, that haven’t been opened in a long time. Before you mark them for deletion, CleanMyMac 3 will prompt you to view and mark the ones you want deleted. Let me tell you more about it.

We start by doing this:

1. Download CleanMyMac 3 – http://macpaw.com/cleanmymac
2. Install it on your Mac
3. Run the app

4.  Find the Large & Old Files tab

5. CleanMyMac 3 has a scanning option. Click Add Folder to select the folder to scan.

6. Select a folder and click Open.

If you want, you can select more than one folder to be scanned. You can do it by repeating the selection with Add Folder.

7. Once you have selected the folders where you will look for outdated and useless information, click Scan.

The app will start scanning the folders.

After that CleanMyMac 3 informs us about the end of data processing and displays the result. Here is my result.

My result is what it is, because, I cannot even imagine my work on Mac without CleanMyMac 3, and I regularly scan my Mac and delete all the junk.

If the application still discovers something, and it is sure to do so, you can go through the list of files found. All the data will be sorted by size, so you can select files that are bigger than 5 GB or between 500 MB and 1 GB, for example.

You might want to keep some of them. To do it, you just need to uncheck the box next to the file you want to keep. If you checked the provided list and realized that you have nothing to lose by deleting them all, just click Clean, and the app will remove all the files forever and give you a few gigabytes of free disk space to use.

The conclusion offers itself. CleanMyMac 3 provides the feature that can help us detect large files that are stored on the hard disk and tell us when was the last time we used that file or application. In the case where the file was last opened over 6 months ago, we suggest that you consider whether you need it at all, because it can take a lot of space on your SSD drive. The application can also easily find large files on external drives.

Once you try it, you will not be able to stop using CleanMyMac 3 and, as in my case, your Mac will always be in perfect order.

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