Ways to free up space on your Mac hard drive

One of the reasons why your Mac may work slowly is that you don't have enough free space on your hard drive. This article will give you instructions on how to free up just the right amount of hard disk space.

1. Get rid of disk images

Many people using a Mac have a huge number of disk images in their Downloads folder. Most commonly, these images were only needed to install a program, and now they're just taking up space on your drive. In order to remove these disk images permanently, you must open the Downloads folder in the Finder. After that, you need to type the phrase "disk images" into the search box. Now you can easily delete all the .dmg and .iso files that are taking up space on your hard drive in one fell swoop.

2. Remove email attachments

If you use the standard Mail application in OS X, then you can view attachments, and the system saves them in a separate folder on your hard drive. Over a couple of months of working with mail, this folder can become several GB in size.

The easiest way to find this folder is to use the Spotlight search engine. All you have to do is type "Mail Downloads" into the search box.

After you open the folder, you can save the files you want in the document or delete all files without saving them.

3. Clear the "cache"

We often hear the advice to clear the "cache" when we encounter problems with the browser. But, OS X saves a huge number of cache files that are not only related to the browser. You can find all these cache files in the ~/Library/Caches folder.