How to Clean Up Junk Files on Mac? 6 Useful You Need to Know

by Chris Woris Best deals near you

Mac is a top-notch machine in terms of low maintenance requirements. Users love Mac because of its performance and how it always works beyond expectations. But like any other computing machine, junk accumulates on your Mac too. Mac requires cleaning sessions to get rid of the junk files, keep on multiplying and hiding beneath important files and folders and drag your Mac slowly by the time you keep on using it.

Although there are several causes of junk accumulation on Mac, most of the junk files gather from the usage of the internet. These junk files create a lot of issues on Mac, like lags, hangs, application failure and so on thus it is necessary to clear all these junk files from your Mac. After reviewing the problem briefly, we have some important tips that help you in cleaning junk from your Mac and have a clean macOS.

1. Clean up Mac cache

Caches are files and information stored by browsers and third-party applications for faster access to data reducing the need to visit the original source again and again. Mac stores this information to improve your browsing experience, however, these files take a huge amount of space on your mac’s drive. To give your Mac a boost and improve its performance, it is recommended to clean these cache files. To get rid of unwanted caches, do the following:

Open Finder Window and click on “Go To Folder”.
Type in ~/Library/Caches and hit enter.
For security, you can copy the items to ensure a backup option stays there.
Open every folder and delete every item from it.
Now go back to Finder Window and repeat the process with the command “/Library/Caches”.

2. Uninstall apps you don't use

As you use your mac with time, you tend to install apps on your Mac for your work or entertainment purposes. These apps take a lot of space on your Mac and with constant usage, every app gets bigger in size. Data like caches, log files, app extensions, update packages, etc your Mac gets slower and slower with time. Experts recommend getting rid of these applications from your Mac.

But doing so is not easy for some users. Generally, users clear data by dragging it into the trash can, but with applications, the process won’t work completely. By dragging applications into the trash can, you can remove apps but the files generated by these apps need separate attention to be cleaned manually.

3. Remove the unused language data from the apps

A lot of Mac applications and macOS itself come with pre-installed language files to access functions in different languages. They take up a huge amount of space on your Mac’s drive. These files can be useful for translators, however, most users use just one language, mainly their mother tongue. You can save a lot of space by removing other unwanted language files and reduce both storage and resource consumption on your Mac. here are the manual steps to remove them manually:

Go to Applications and list all apps whose language files you want to remove.
Right-click on the application icon and select Show Package Content
The resource folder opens up. Now delete all files ending with “.lproj”.
After deleting files, refresh your desktop to make changes in effect.

4. Empty your Mac trash bin

When you drag files in the trash bin of your Mac, the files actually stay inside your trash bin and still take up space on the drive. Trash bin generally keeps the files for recovery, but most of the files are useless thus you should wipe these files permanently rather than keeping them intact on your drive through the trash bin. Here is a two-step process that you should always follow after you drag something into your trash bin.

Click and hold or right-click on the trash bin icon on the desktop screen.
Click on the Empty Trash option from the popup menu and it appears on the side of the icon.

5. Find and delete large and old files

If you wonder where your disk space went, even after cleaning the junk and cache files, then there will be large and bulky files stored on your drive like bulky backups, Zip folders, installation packages, disk images, etc. To clear the important space on your disk drive, go to each folder and delete all unwanted large files. Once you delete them, empty your trash can and you will see a good space available on your disk drive.