Wondering if your Mac has enough storage space for that massive download? Wonder no more.
In today’s era of multi-terabyte hard drives and online storage, many of us don’t keep as close an eye on our disk usage as we used to. Still, even the largest drives fill up eventually.
If you don’t know how to check your disk space use on your Mac, here’s where to look first.
And for long-term upkeep, there are plenty of powerful apps such as CleanMyMac ($34.95/£34.95) and DaisyDisk ($9.99/£9.99) which offer useful visualizations of your hard drive storage, while also allowing you to delete unnecessary files that hog too much space. Many of them also offer free trials — we’ve covered the ones worth downloading in round up of the Best Mac Cleaners.
Also see our guide on how to clear disk space on a Mac.Options 1 and 2: From the Finder
The Finder gives you a couple of ways to see how much free disk space you have. These are the easiest ways.
Preview your storage device. In macOS, if you select an item in the Finder and press the spacebar on your keyboard, you get a preview of the item. For example, if you select a text document and then press the spacebar, you can see what’s in the document without actually opening it.
You can use preview to check your storage device’s capacity. Here’s how.
1. Select the storage device on the Desktop. (To make your storage device appear on your Desktop, go to the Finder and select Finder > Preferences, click on General, and modify the setting for Show these items on the Desktop.) Or open a Finder window, look in the left column, under the Devices heading, and select the storage device.
2. Press the spacebar. You should see a window open that shows the capacity of your storage device and the available space.
3. To close the window, press spacebar again or press Command-W, or click on the close-window icon (the circle X) in the upper left.
