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Jul 05, 2021 Select ‘About This Mac.’. On the window that opens, go to the ‘Overview’ tab. Here various details of your Mac are shown, including Memory usage. For more information, click on the ‘System Report’ button. Under hardware, find the Memory tab. On the right pane, you will see the slot details.
- Memory Cleaner is ABSOLUTELY FREE and allows you to automatically clean up inactive memory and speed up your Mac. Follow these steps to clear RAM with Memory Cleaner: Launch Memory Cleaner. The app will constantly be active from the toolbar on your desktop, displaying the used memory. In Preferences set up the frequency of automatic memory cleanup.
- Are you talking about disk/storage memory? They are two distinct entities. Deleting files off disk won't (typically) affect the RAM usage of the machine. RAM is used by running applications, so the easiest way to free up RAM is to quit applications that you're not using.
- SpeedUp Mac from Stellar is a 30-day free-to-use software, which can be used to clean up MacBook and iMac disks and memory for improved performance. Using this application, you can get rid of duplicate files, uninstall unused third-party applications, selectively clean your disks, and optimize system memory utilization.
- How to free up space on a Mac?
- How to see the used Storage on a Mac?
- How to Fix Mac Startup Disk Full with pCloud Drive?
- Note: If you have very low disk storage you must do the following:
- Example:
If you are a Mac user and you have a smaller HDD Macbook, chances are you have seen this message at least once: “Your startup disk is almost full” or you want to know how to free up space.
In this article, I will explain why this happens and how to never see this warning ever again!
Memory Optimizer Windows 10
How to free up space on a Mac?
What is a “Mac Startup Disk”?
Your Mac startup disk is a volume or a partition of a drive that contains a usable operating system. You can set your Mac to automatically use a specific startup volume, or you can temporarily override this choice at startup.
What this means is that the startup disk is the “home” of all the files needed for starting your Mac and using it.
Without a startup disk, you will not be able to switch on your computer.
Why is my Mac “Startup Disk Full”?
In short, you have too many files. When this happens, it slows down all processes on your computer – see, in order to complete some tasks, your computer needs space to store temporary files and system files. When this happens and you run low on storage, the operating system needs to decide whether it can delete some files in order to complete the task. Most of the time this is not possible and the computer crashes or becomes very, very slow.
It is recommended that a startup disk should never be at above 85% of its capacity in order to work properly.
How to see the used Storage on a Mac?
If you want to see the exact types of files that are using the storage on your Mac:
Click the Apple in the top-left corner
Click on “Storage”
Currently, I have 73.9 GB used and 425.2 GB Free.
Most of my used storage is from “Other”
What is “Other” in the Mac Storage?
According to Apple, in OS X El Capitan or earlier versions, “Other” files are those that your Mac doesn’t recognize as belonging to any other category. These include files within disk images or archives, data stored by apps such as Contacts or Calendar, and app plug-ins or extensions. When your Mac is running in Safe Mode, all files are categorized as Other.
How to Fix Mac Startup Disk Full with pCloud Drive?
What is pCloud Drive
pCloud Drive is a desktop application that creates a secure virtual drive on your computer, which you can use to easily store, access and work with your files in the cloud.
To add files and folders to your pCloud Drive, simply drag and drop* your data into your virtual drive. You can then be sure that they are safely stored in the cloud and synchronized on all of your devices.
*for this to work fast you need to have at least some free storage on your startup disk. If you don’t, keep reading!
pCloud Drive provides a number of additional functionalities, such as integrated file sharing and synchronization through your computer.
Note: If you have very low disk storage you must do the following:
Choose the folder you want to Sync with pCloud:
Click on the pCloud icon and choose Sync to pCloud:
Create a folder on pCloud Drive:
Wait for the Sync to be completed:
This is very Important! After the Sync is finished, you must stop it with the cross icon:
After you stopped the Sync you can delete the files you just synchronized:
You can go to pCloud Drive and see the files you synced and use them as if they are on your computer! (A green icon means everything is synced.)
The app significantly eases your work upon performing file operations in the cloud, because with pCloud Drive you can work with your files using any software on your computer.
What this means is that if I have a vacation video in pCloud Drive I can watch it with no problem with the default video player on my computer. In my case VLC Player.
The best thing is that since the video is in pCloud Drive it is not actually on my computer but it’s in the cloud and does not take ANY of my Startup Disk Space!
Another awesome thing is that I can watch this video also on my phone with the pCloud mobile apps OR if I’m using a different computer that does not have pCloud Drive, I can watch it via Chrome, Firefox or any other internet browser. I just need to go to my.pcloud.com and sign in. Here is what I see:
Same thing works for:
– Documents – I can open and edit them with any text editor with pCloud Drive or access them from any of the other apps. The same works for worksheets, PDFs, presentations etc.
– Photos – I can open them, see them or edit them with Photoshop or any other image editor.
– Audio files – I can listen to them on my default music player or with pCloud mobile and web apps music player. I can even create playlists within pCloud.
– Every other type of file – As long as I have an app or a program to open the file with, there is no problem for pCloud Drive.
Nice right?!
What this means is that you can move all the files that are using your Mac Startup Disk Storage in pCloud Drive.
That way they WILL NOT use any of the space on your computer and you will still have access to them and use them with the apps installed.
Example:
I have a 512GB SSD Macbook Pro Retina. I also have a pCloud Premium account which is 500GB of storage. This makes my Macbook capable of storing 1TB worth of files.
Sharing with pCloud Drive
You can share any file or folder that you have in pCloud Drive.
You just right-click on the file or folder you want to share and choose if you want to invite someone to the folder or create a so called Download link.
This way you can collaborate with people or share the vacation photos and videos with your friends for example.
pCloud Speed
When you use pCloud Drive, you don’t even understand that your files are not stored locally. That’s because of the super high speed that we offer for uploading and downloading files. We compared our upload and download speed with the ones of Dropbox and here are the results for 1.12GB file:
pCloud Security
To guarantee your files’ safety, pCloud uses TLS/SSL encryption, applied when information is transferred from your device to the pCloud servers.
Your files are stored on at least three server locations in a highly secure data storage area.
Optionally, you can subscribe for pCloud Crypto and have your most important files encrypted and password protected. We provide the so-called client-side encryption, which, unlike server-side encryption, means that no one except you will have the keys for file decryption.
Conclusion
A lot of Mac users have the same frustrating problem. Startup Disk Storage fills up quickly on smaller versions (128GB and 256GB) and if you use it for work, you can fill up a 512GB Mac very fast too. Especially if you are a designer or a video editor for example, and work with large files. And even if you are not creating huge files, with the pace we are creating information is growing very fast:
Just think about this: smartphones and cameras that can shoot RAW files and in 4K, which means you’ll have photos and videos of amazing quality – but they will also take a lot of memory so the more space you have, the better.
pCloud Drive helps you virtually add storage to your Mac (or any PC for that matter). You can move your photos, videos, music, documents any other kinds of files there and use them as if they are on your device with the apps you are used to. Also, you can access them on a smartphone via the pCloud mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile, and in a web browser when you go to the website and sign in.
P.S.
If you never want to run out of storage on your iPhone too, read this.
Let me start by saying that I’m no computer-whizz or Macbook expert. I am, however, someone who constantly had to clear space from their laptop because of all of the photos and videos I import. I just didn’t understand how so much space was being taken up when I transferred pictures, files and videos to a USB regularly.
This isn’t at all the kind of post I’d usually put up, but if you’re a blogger/YouTuber/file hoarder, hopefully this will be of some help to you and stop the dreaded “your startup disk is almost full” notification.
So I looked up a few ways to clear storage online, and while some were helpful, I found a good few ways to free up storage by looking around my laptop myself. If you’re deleting files, photos and documents from your laptop, all I can say is be careful. You don’t want to end up deleting critical files and losing things of high sentimental or functional value.
To check how much storage you’ve free on your Mac and what’s taking up memory, click on the apple in the top left hand corner of your screen. Go to “About This Mac” and then click “Storage”. This shows you a breakdown of the memory on your computer.
From there you’ll be able to see what’s taking up the most storage. I transferred old photos/videos/files to a USB and deleted whatever I didn’t need. Yet, while those categories went down in memory, “Other” remained quite high. “Other” is basically everything except for photos, videos, apps, music and backups. Basically, it’s a load of files and messy things (there’s a technical term for that I’m sure, but anyway).
Free Up Memory On Macbook
Here’s how I reduced my “Other” storage and created 50GB of free storage on my Macbook Air:
- Go through the Mail app – I had four different mail boxes on my Mail app. FOUR! That’s thousands and thousands of emails, and therefore a huge amount of memory being used up. I removed three of the accounts and now just check them on the actual Outlook/Gmail website instead.
- Go through “recently deleted” in Photos – Photos has its own trash can in the form of “recently deleted”. Once you’re sure you don’t want those photos anymore, delete them for good. I also went through “iPhoto events” which had copies of photos I’d already deleted.
- Organise your files by size – Go into Finder, click “All my files” and then “arrange by size”. This will show you the biggest files on your computer and what’s taking up the most memory.
- Check for duplicate files – Once you’ve done that, arrange the files by name and delete duplicate files. Make sure that you’re deleting the file that you don’t need or use, otherwise you could cause some problems. I used the Duplicate Detective app to do this and found it really helpful, although there were a few duplicates I found manually after this.
- Empty your trash – See all of the files you’ve deleted? They’re still sitting in the trash can. Empty it.
- Check your messages – My phone is synced up to my laptop so every time I get a text, iMessage or not, it goes to my laptop too. If you text a lot, like me, you could have thousands of messages taking up space on your computer.
- Go through “On This Mac” – This was something I only found out this week, but it freed a huge amount of space on my computer. You’d think that “All my files” shows all of your files, wouldn’t you? Well it doesn’t. Go to Finder, then click the search bar. Type in anything at all. You’ll see that the option comes up to search “This Mac” or “All My Files”. Select “This Mac” and you may find hundreds of hidden files. I went through all of these files by searching by file type. So I searched the terms JPEG, emlx (loads of saved emails were hidden here for some reason), message and so on. Look at the file types (PDF, etc) in “All my files” and then search for them by file type on “This Mac”. I found loads of photos that came with the laptop that were useless to me and using up huge amounts of storage.
- Delete apps you don’t need – There might be some apps that you downloaded and forgot about, so go through “Apps” in Finder and delete the ones you don’t use.
- Clear out iMovie – If you make YouTube videos, files in iMovie are probably taking up a huge amount of storage. Go through your projects, events, iMovie theatre, iMovie library and delete what you don’t need. As soon as I save a finished video as a file, I delete everything to do with that video from iMovie and save the file to a USB before deleting it totally off my laptop. Movie files can be massive so try to clear iMovie regularly.
- Find iPhoto -I’m not sure why but the iPhoto app recently updated to Photo. You’d think that the update would just move everything over to Photo and have one copy of it, but no. When I was going through my apps I found iPhoto lurking there, with four thousand photos in it. I made sure I’d already copied all of them to a USB and then deleted all of the photos and the app itself. Sneaky iPhoto.
There are hundreds of different ways to find files on your computer and to find what’s taking up your storage, but these are the ones that have helped me the most. As I said, make sure you’re not deleting anything important. So don’t go sweeping through your laptop deleting everything in sight. If you can, delete everything one by one. That way you know exactly what you’re getting rid of and you won’t have any disasters. And grab a cup of coffee (or three), it’s gonna take a while.
Memory Cleaner For Mac
As I said, I’m no expert so this is just what I’ve learnt myself. I hope this is helpful – let me know if there’s anything I can explain further and I’ll get back to you!