Mac refresh
Finder, files and apps
Easily find your way around your storage and software
C
ontrary to myth, thousands of small files all over your Mac’s startup drive won’t normally affect its performance.
Nor do you need to defragment your hard drive, like in the old days – macOS takes care of that. The time to worry about space is when your drive gets within a few dozen gigabytes of full, and the place to do something about it is the Finder. We’ve also got tips and shortcuts for customising your workspace and organising your apps, windows, files and folders.
1 Store crazy
From the Apple menu at the top left of the screen, choose About This Mac. Click the Storage tab and wait a few seconds for an overview of how much space is used by what types of content on all the drives inside or connected to your Mac. You can click the Manage button for suggested ways to make more room, but we’re not big fans of this: it’s quite a minefield, encouraging you to turn on cloud syn c options that have complex implications and to delete files without the usual safeguard of putting them in the Bin (aka Trash).