how to clear space on a mac startup disk

Something else to keep in mind is that the deleted languages get reinstalled every time you update your system software or individual apps. While that’s not all that much space in the world of 3TB drives, if you’re living with a 128GB MacBook Air, each GB counts. Monolingual’s initial run can reclaim as much as 2 gigs of data if you have a bunch of apps installed.

All you do is select the languages you want to delete making sure to keep English (or any languages that you use) and then click Remove. Solution: delete those extraneous languages using the free app Monolingual ( download link). Those extra languages, many of which you’ve never even heard of, are all unnecessary and take up space on your hard drive. This is an easy one: chances are you’re only using your Mac in one language, maybe two – you’d be surprised to learn that OS X and individual apps install a bunch more languages than that.

As with all our guides, and Mac ownership in general, it’s best to make sure you have a complete backup before you start deleting things, to insulate yourself from any accidental deletions. It’s time to recover some space on your drive with a few relatively simple maintenance activities. So here we are yet again with our storage filling up. iPhone 4K videos can easily be multiple gigabytes in size, and we’re all storing more photos than we were seven years ago. Of course, as SSD capacity has increased, so has the amount of data many of us are storing. Now most people can afford the storage they need in Apple’s base models, and those with the means and the need can go as far as dropping an extra $2,200 to upgrade their 16″ MacBook Pro to a previously unimaginable 8TB of storage. In is nascent years, abundant flash storage was prohibitively expensive. Since this post was first written in 2013, solid-state storage has become ubiquitous in all of Apple’s laptops and a relatively affordable option in their iMacs. This post was originally written in 2013, it’s updated here to reflect new apps, new settings and services.

How to clear space on a mac startup disk