Over time your Mac’s storage space can get depleted or full. When this occurs your Mac’s speed and efficiency are affected. It is best to remove unnecessary temporary files that could hinder the speed.
Various applications, web browsers, and the Mac operating system create temporary files. The Mac operating system automatically creates temporary files in the background to facilitate saving your work as a backup.
The following blog post provides a simple guide to assist you in removing temporary files from your Mac to improve the speed and efficiency of your Apple Mac.
A Simple Guide To Remove Temporary Files From Your Mac
Various applications and processes automatically create temporary files for your Apple Mac’s operating system. Although useful in some cases, these files, like when you are working on a document and need to recover a previous version, can take up valuable space on your hard drive.
Remove these temporary files from your Mac to maximize the speed and storage of your system.
Here is a simple guide to removing temporary files from your Mac;
Select the Apple menu in the left-hand corner.
- Choose System Settings
- Click on General
On the right, you will find the Storage tab. Click on that, and it will lead you to a drop-down menu of various categories, like Applications, Documents, Photos, System Data, etc.
You can remove the categories with an info tab on the right-hand side.
- All the apps installed on your Apple Mac are on your Application tab.
- Documents allow you to view all current and saved documents on your Mac. You can select documents based on name, document type, last accessed, or size. You can view and remove the larger files that usually take up space. To view the contents and amount of storage, click on file Browser.
- System Data: Contains files that don’t fall into the regular categories. This category primarily includes the system’s files and data, such as log files, caches, VM files, and other runtime system resources. Also included are temporary files, fonts, app support files, and plug-ins. You can’t manage the contents of this category. Apple macOS manage the contents, and the category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac. You can manage your data that falls outside the other categories using the Finder or the third-party apps that created it.
Select the relevant file and click delete if you want to remove or delete temporary files. To view the removed file, click on Show in Finder, which allows you to view the file in Finder.
You can also try the following to remove temporary files from your Mac;
- First up, navigate to your Mac’s main screen or desktop. Press the key combination of ‘shift-command- G’ with the Finder window open, which will open a ‘Go to Folder window.
- Next, enter the command ‘~/Library/Caches’ into the search box and click the ‘Go’ button. This new window will display your Mac’s cached files.
- To select all the folders, hold down the ‘command’ key and press the ‘A’ key. Then, press ‘command-delete’ to delete the selected folders.
- You will receive a confirmation message asking you to confirm the action. To proceed, you must enter your Mac’s password.
- Note that you may still see a folder if you have Windows open. Be sure to close all windows before attempting to delete the cached files.
Final Thoughts
Storage space is essential to every Apple Mac user. Therefore, regularly removing temporary files from your system is essential. The steps in this simple guide to remove temporary files in your Mac will free up storage space, improve your Apple Mac’s performance, and avoid privacy and security issues
