When your Mac starts running slow, you probably begin to search the web to find reasons behind the cause and the ways to boost its performance. In the majority of cases, background processes make your Mac work slower, and sometimes the fancy visuals that you have enabled to give your Mac an amazing appearance are at fault.
Let’s have a look at some of the useful tips that help speed up a sluggish Mac.
Manage Storage on Your Mac Drive
Manage storage on your Mac using the Storage Management window. It offers recommendations to enable several features for optimizing storage. The window will show features that have turned off and don’t include ones that are already turned on. The Storage Management window provides the following options to help you free space on your Mac system.
Store in iCloud
Moving your hard drive data to iCloud is a smart and safe option as it doesn’t involve risks of disk damage, unauthorized access, or system crashes. In fact, it is recommended that you only keep important data on your Mac and move everything else to cloud storage.
Photos and videos that you store on your Mac consume most of the hard disk space. So, when you decide to move your hard drive data to iCloud, start with moving the high-resolution images and other multimedia, and then the documents.
Optimize Storage
Turning on the Optimize Storage option will automatically remove watched TV shows and movies. When disk space is needed, the movies and TV shows purchased from Apple will be removed automatically from the hard drive, and you will get ample storage.
If you turn on this option, your Mac will keep only the most recent email attachments and other data on the hard drive while moving the older ones to iCloud when storage space on the hard drive is needed.
Empty Trash Automatically
Trash on the Mac is undoubtedly a great place to dump all your files. If you think you can only put unnecessary files in the Trash, you will be amazed to know that you can also recover accidentally deleted files from there. You just need to drag the files to the Trash in the Dock to remove them from your system.
To speed up your Mac, you will require emptying Trash frequently as it will free up space on the hard drive. If you select Empty Trash Automatically from the Storage Management window, all the files that are residing in Trash for more than 30 days will get deleted.
You need to remove file clutter from your Mac system to make it perform faster. Having a bunch of large files makes your system unresponsive and reduces disk space. Storing such files on your Mac hard drive for longer will degrade its performance significantly.
The Reduce Clutter option available in the Storage Management window allows you to remove large and junk files that you might don’t need anymore
Tips to Free Up Drive Space
- Deleting files and documents from your system will make a lot of space on your Apple hard drive.
- Move your data to iCloud to have bulk space on Mac as it will allow storing other important files and folders on the hard disk.
- Delete all fonts, dictionaries, and languages that you have not used in the recent past.
- Identify duplicate downloads in Safari, keep the most recent versions while deleting the older ones.
- If you are using macOS Sierra or the latest version, your Mac is doing a great job in emptying storage automatically.
- Set reminders to erase used app installers, clear cache files, unnecessary data, and logs on sensing low storage on the Mac hard drive.
Recommended to Know!
- Move files to external storage media to free up space on the hard disk.
- Compress your large files as they will consume less storage space.
- Disk images often consume a lot of space, so make sure to delete them regularly.
- Duplicating files on an AFPS-formatted volume doesn’t occupy additional space on storage media.
- In the About This Mac, the storage pane is the best place to check the storage space left on the hard drive.
- Don’t let your old backups overload your hard drive, and make it a routine to delete any redundant backups to optimize space and speed up your Mac.
- If you do not require any files on your Mac system, you should delete the original as well as the duplicate version(s) of that file as it will speed up your Mac.
- If you add any additional data to the duplicate file, deleting that file will only free up space that has been occupied by the additional data and not its entire file size.
