First, click on the 'Apple' menu in the upper-left corner of the screen and select 'About This Mac.' In the window that pops up, click on the 'Storage' button. (Depending on your macOS version, this may look like a tab instead of a button). Click About This Mac. In the pop-up window, click the Storage tab. Hover your mouse over the blank section of the bar chart, or look at the text above, to find your available storage. How To Check MacBook Storage: Finder Status Bar. Want to be able to check your MacBook storage all the time, without needing to do anything? Solution 1 Preview storage device. When you select a file in the Finder of Mac and press the blank. To check the system storage space, you can click on the Apple logo on the top left corner of the main screen on your Mac system and select 'About This Mac' and then on 'Storage'. You may notice that the system takes up a large amount of storage, sometimes even up to 470GB!
Mac users often freak out when they look at the Storage settings in About This Mac and find that System storage takes up way more space than they think it should. However, if they wait a bit the storage meter will continue to calculate what takes up space and allocate it to iCloud Drive and other things. Even once this is done, a fairly large System storage amount can be accounted for by looking at your System folder, system Library folder, and user Library folders.Check out Why Is My Mac System Storage So Big? at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
Video Transcript: This is a question I hear over and over again. Online, on the Apple discussion groups I get asked it. It's asked in other forums all over the place. Why does the system storage on my Mac take up so much space? If you go into About My Mac and then go to Storage, then go and look at the bar for System Storage, sometimes it can look alarmingly big. Well, I'm going to tell you why you probably see it as looking really big, why it's probably not as big as you think, and how to find out what really is taking up the space.First, looking here notice what happens when you first go to Storage. You'll see that you get a kind of general like used and not used. Then after a while it starts to divide up in sections. When it first does this System Storage looks huge. So in my case it's almost 90 GB. A lot of people make the mistake of stopping here. They figure something's wrong and they go to investigate it or not investigate it or complain or whatever. But what they don't do is they don't wait because it's still calculating. It's still going to try and figure some things out. It takes awhile.I'm showing you this in real time. So you can see now it's still not updating, it's still not updating. It's still just shows you that it's at 90 GB in System Storage and leaving you to guess what's wrong. I really think there should be a little message there stating still calculating or something like that. But if you wait long enough eventually it will begin to divide things out. What it's doing there is that it is looking in the system and library folders and it's figuring out what's inside there. If it finds something that belongs in another category it will move it to that other category. But it takes awhile. So if we wait long enough we will see it change.There, it just did. You can see it took a big chunk and it put it into iCloud Drive. So iCloud is actually accounting for a lot of what was previously seen as being System. The thing is that in one of the Library folders is an actual folder that can change the data for iCloud Drive files and other things. So it sees that as being part of the System folder. It reports that back. As it gets more information about what's in the System folder it says, ah I can break this out and put it in another category. Now even though 50 GB of System Storage is now allocated to iCloud Drive, 40 GB still seems too big, right. So you want to investigate. Now unfortunately if you go to Manage and you look you're just going to be told the same thing. There's a lot taken up by System Storage. But you have complete control to be able to look in the folders on your Mac and figure out what's what. So why not do that?Now I happen to know that System Storage is going to be in both the System folder and the Library folder. So the first place I want to look is at the computer level and look at the System folder and use Command i to get info and then see how big that is. Then do the same thing with the Library folder. Using that I can account for half of System Storage. But only half. So where is the other half? Well, there are two Library folders. There's a Library folder for the system and there's also a Library folder for each user. I go into my User Library folder and you can get to there by going to the Go menu. You won't see Library there initially but if you hold the Option key down on your keyboard the Library appears. You can go to the Library folder. Looking in the Library folder I can see that it's huge. Also I can see that there is a folder in there that is the iCloud Drive data I saw before. But also other folders that are taking up lots of space as well. I can look in those and get an idea of what it's being used for. It's being used for cache files. It's being used to cache my iCloud Photo Library so I have some of the photo images there. It's being used to cache files, being used to cache things for Safari. It all seems accounted for and it's all being really well used because I have this space on my drive so my Mac knows that it should use it to try to speed up my experience. If I was shorter on space so I didn't have much space on my drive it wouldn't use so much. But since I have that space it's using it very wisely to give me a better computing experience on my Mac. That accounts for all of the System Storage space. There's mystery there. It's all accounted for and it all makes sense.Matt Cone December 21, 2011 TutorialsMac Mac mountain lion download.
Ever wonder how much free space is available on your Mac's hard disk or partitions? It's easy to check in OS X. Plus, if your Mac is running Mac OS 10.7 or later, the interface shows which types of files are taking up the most space, a feature that could help you track down space-hogging files and applications.
How To Check Mac System Storage
Checking Available Hard Drive Space on Mac OS 10.7 or Later
If your Mac is running OS 10.7 or later, here's how to check to the available hard drive space on your Mac:
From the Apple menu, select About This Mac. The window shown below appears.
Click More Info. The About This Mac window appears.
Click Storage. The window shown below appears.
Use this window to check how much hard drive space is available on your Mac. The startup disk is shown at the top of the list; other partitions are shown below. Notice that you can see how much of your hard drive space is being consumed by audio files, movies, etc. This information could be useful when your hard drive is nearly full and you need to delete some files.
Checking Available Hard Drive Space on Mac OS 10.6 or Earlier
If your Mac is running Mac OS 10.6 or earlier, here's how to check to the available hard drive space on your Mac:
Switch to the Finder, and then open a new Finder window.
From the sidebar, select your hard disk by clicking it once, as shown below.
From the File menu, select Get Info. The window shown below appears.
Check Storage On Mac
The window shows the disk space available on your Mac's hard drive. Unfortunately, there's no slick interface like the one in 10.7 or later, but at least you'll know whether or not you're running out of space on your hard drive.
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