How To Find The Biggest Files On Your Mac?

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The size of the files on your Mac can be a major cause of concern when it comes to storage. Even if you have a large storage space, at some point it will come in handy. In this article, we are going to discuss how you can find out the biggest files on your mac which will help you know about the fat files that you might need to get rid of.

Find the Biggest Files on Your Mac

As soon as your computer becomes old, it becomes slow. It occurs because you download a lot of files on your computer. Large files are the main culprit for slowing your computer. It causes high disk usage and you may face problems while adding more data to your hard drive.

The biggest files on your Mac lessens the capacity of your hard disk. You may feel that all of the files on your Mac are important. But it is not like that. There are many unnecessary data are present on your device which is continuously eating up your space and disk capacity.

Most of us forget where we have stored or downloaded various folders. So it becomes challenging for us to find the biggest unnecessary files from our Mac and delete them correctly. In this article, we will show you some basic steps of finding the biggest files as well as deleting them.

Finding the Biggest Files

If you are using macOS Sierra or later versions you can follow these steps. The new version of Mac has a new feature named Hard disk Management. This feature will help you to optimize the storage of your Mac. You can reduce the clutter and clean the trash. You can find the bigger files using this feature. At first;

  1. Go to the menu bar and click the apple logo.
  2. Choose the option About this Mac.
  3. Select Storage from the top.

Click The Manage Button

Now you can see a Manage button at the right side corner of the screen.

  1. Click the Manage button which will open a new window.
  2. From this window, search for the Reduce Clutter Function option.

Now;

  1. Click on the Review Files in order to see the biggest files list of your Mac.
  2. Select the biggest files according to their category.

These files are very old and you are not using them for a long time. From here, you can simply delete the unnecessary files.

Drawbacks of Using Hard Disk Management

The above process does not always work. Some categories cannot be deleted. The overfilling of your hard drive is responsible for this problem. You should use many other storage management tools while you are working on a big project on your Mac. It eases the task of deleting the biggest files from your Mac.

Using Terminal for Deleting Biggest Files

Many people like to use Terminal to solve any problem on their Computer. It is easier than the process. The terminal will also help you to delete your largest files from Mac. There is some built-in command that helps to find the biggest files. For doing the task;

  1. Launch the terminal of your Mac using the key command.
  2. Copy - Paste or carefully type the command below:

sudo find / -type f -size +100000k -exec ls -lh {} ; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }'

Terminal Commands for DeletionThis command will let you see all the file paths of unnecessary files above 100 MB size. For deleting the files;

  1. Enter the administrator account password.
  2. Get the super user permission.
  3. Now use the command- rm "path"
  4. Delete those files.

And, you are done.

Summary: Find the Biggest Files on Your Mac

  • Open a new finder window.
  • You’ll see the files and folders on your Mac, usually arranged by kind.
  • Click column header so you can see the “Size” of each file or folder.
  • Wait while Mac calculates size of files and folders, if necessary.
  • Click “Size” header again to reverse sort order, so you’ll see largest files and folders at the top, sorted largest to smallest.