This is the third article of a series of articles on reducing disk space usage on your Mac. Read the first post: Reducing Disk Usage on Your Mac by Processing Your Videos and second post: Reducing Disk Usage on Your Mac with OmniDiskSweeper if you haven’t.

In our second article, we talked about running OmniDiskSweeper and manually going through the directories and cleaning those that unnecessarily use up space. There is another utility that helps to reclaim disk space more easily – CleanMyMac.

Note that CleanMyMac is a paid app with a free download.

Running CleanMyMac

Once you launch the app, it’ll give you a couple of options to clean on the left bar. Make sure Automatic Cleanup is selected and click Start Over and then Scan to start.

It should take a few minutes to scan your hard disk/SSD. Once it’s done scanning, it should report how much space it can clean automatically. Careful now, DO NOT click the Clean button. Instead, look at the left bar and click on System Cleanup.

Click on Detail Results and it should show you a detailed breakdown of the items to will be cleaned.

As a good habit, we’ll want to only clean those items that we know will be safe without. I usually uncheck most items, including iOS Photo Cache (careful!) and check items such as iOS Software Updates that I know is safe to remove. Click Clean – it should prompt you for your password – and let it do its job.

Continue on with Large & Old Files as well as Trash Cleanup. Happy cleaning!

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This is the second post of a series of articles on reducing disk space usage on your Mac. Read the first post, Reducing Disk Usage on Your Mac by Processing Your Videos if you haven’t.

In order to reduce disk usage, you need to know what is unnecessarily using up disk space. OmniDiskSweeper from The Omni Group is great for figuring this out. Download it directly here.

Running OmniDiskSweeper

Launch the app and it’ll show you a list of drives. Chances are the first entry will read “Macintosh HD”. That is your hard disk/SSD. Double click on it to start scanning your drive contents. If you have multiple hard disks or have external disks attached, you will see more than one entry.

Subject to the size and type of your disk, OmniDiskSweeper should take at least a few minutes to run. While it’s running, the title bar will say it’s “sizing” and you’ll see that the numbers besides each directory have different colors. The numbers indicate how much space the directory is taking up, with a red number indicating that directory is still being scanned.

Once the app is done (the word “sizing” will no longer be shown in the title bar). In the screenshot above, you’ll see that in my case, the /Users directory is taking up a whooping 172.6 GB of my hard disk. That can present some good opportunity for clearing up my disk. You can browse around by clicking.

For illustration purposes, let’s say I want to delay cleaning of my Pictures and Documents directories for the time being. Taking up 5.8GB, the Downloads directory is low hanging fruit. Since this is where the Mac saves downloaded files, I double-click it the directory – opening Finder – and verifies that there isn’t any file that I want to keep. I then empty the entire Downloads directory.

Repeat this process for the bigger directories that aren’t managed by the system (such as Library) and you’ll be able to trim a lot of fats from your drive.

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With recent iOS devices like the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s, the built-in camera has improved so much that the videos taken are gigantic, consuming roughly 3MB/sec. This means a 10 minute footage takes up 1.8GB! Take a couple of videos on a trip and you’ll quickly run out of disk space on your phone and (after you transfer it to your Mac) your Mac. With more and more users switching to SSDs – seriously, you should switch from hard disk drives to SSD if you haven’t, they are insanely fast compared to hard disk drives – which are generally more expensive and have lower capacities than hard disk drives, disk space is at a premium. A Macbook Air or Macbook Pro with an SSD will likely only have 128GB–256GB of disk space.

Other than flat out trimming and deleting these videos, the easiest way to cut down on disk space consumed by videos is to process and convert them using an app like Handbrake ¹

Handbrake is free software. I’m keeping some videos just in case I want to check them out again. Maybe it’s a certain moment I captured of a loved one unwrapping a present. Usually I don’t need to keep them at the original resolution and quality. That’s where Handbrake comes in handy. The app is easy to use, pick the source video, choose a preset configuration from the list and hit the start button. Once it’s done, you can verify the video processed is correct and then delete the original. For the more important videos, I’ll choose the preset for the latest Apple TV and for other videos that I want to keep around, iPhone & iPod touch. The former reduces disk space usage for my videos by 30% and the latter by 80%! i.e., a 10 minute recording taking up 1.8GB gets reduced to 1.2GB and 270MB respectively.

You can drag the converted videos into iTunes so they can be synced to your iOS devices.

A few additional technical details

Before you hit the Start button to begin conversion, double check that the line at the bottom which shows you if the video is cropped. You typically don’t want any cropping. This is especially important if your video is not taken with an iOS device with the same aspect ratio.

You want to make sure you encode the videos using the video codec H.264 so that iTunes and iOS devices can play them.

If you found this post useful, you might also like the second post in this article series on reducing disk space usage on your Mac: Reducing Disk Usage on Your Mac with OmniDiskSweeper, and if you want to try my take on a hard disk space cleaning app, check out SimplyDiskSweeper.

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