I tend to spring clean at the beginning of each year and get rid of clothes and shoes I haven’t worn in the last 12 months. I also do the same with my digital content and clean up my laptop’s storage. Last year for the first time I didn’t use Migration Assistant to transfer all my stuff to my then new Macbook. Instead, I started afresh. It was a big step for me because I like familiar surroundings and the thought of downloading and setting everything up from scratch was daunting. I did it and it wasn’t so bad.

When setting up a new MacBook, I only care about two main things – Office for Mac and Photoshop, which I keep on the cloud now. The rest can come later as I remember what I need. Everything I’ve bought on the App Store will always be available on any device I log into (with the correct App Store version it was purchased on).

It’s almost a year later and time for a clean up. I use the trial version of Daisy Disk to help find large files that are taking up space. It searches your hard drive and displays colour coded results which you can target easily. 

Here’s how you can clean your MacBook hard drive easily:

1. Download Daisy Disk from the official site: https://daisydiskapp.com (don’t use the App Store because you will get the paid option of R149).

2. Whenever you open DaisyDisk on the trial version after your first use, you just have to wait for the that status bar to do its thing, and choose ‘test drive’

3. Your hard drive will be selected by default. Select “Scan”.

4. Your results will be displayed in a colour coded graph and if you hover over it you can see what section it is. I went into Users in the screenshot below, which shows all my multimedia content between its folders:

5. If you want to go straight into the folder of the selected item, just ‘right click’ it for the option. I had over 100GB of iOS backups taking space on my hard drive so I deleted the old ones:

6. Carry on going into folders that you want to delete content from. I’ve deleted old TV series and movies that I’ve watched. I no longer save content after watching it. 

7. Lastly, don’t forget to empty Trash!

That’s it – you’ve freed up loads of space from your Mac hard drive, easily. 

If there are any other How To’s you’d like to see on this blog, let me know via the comments or tweet me @nafisa1 or email inbox@nafisa.co.za