Just curious - I think it’s been discussed before. But how does everyone maintain / monitor their storage on their mac. For reference, I have a 1Tb m1 mac mini, but with only about 70gb of space left. This number fluctuates on how often my mac restarts. Sometimes, it’s 70 or up to 120gb.
I took a deeper look under users via Daisy Disk. These are the main culprits.
Pictures: 214 Gb (I store all photos locally here)
Library: 521 Gb - upon inspecting this further.
Messages is 135 Gb,
Mobile Documents is 90Gb, (WhatsApp and iCloud Drive are an even split)
Application Support is 84 Gb (Logos is occupying 60Gb, followed by MacWhisper, DevonThink)
Group Containers are 81 Gb
Caches are 57 Gb (CloudKit is 50gb no clue what com.apple.bird is)
CloudStorage are 35 Gb
Containers are 20 Gb
Metadata is 10 Gb
Logs are 2.6 Gb
If anyone has suggestions OR if you have workflows that you use, please share! I do have a Synology NAS that should probably be better used or integrated. For those who will comment on the huge size of Messages, I keep all my messages on phone/mac for persona/work related reasons. The ability to pull up conversations from X amount of days, months, and even years in several cases have been instrumental in many situations.
Yes your NAS should be better used. Move your photos there.
And I’ll also comment on your huge size of messages. Obviously not text, but probably lots of photos/videos (particularly videos) were attached. System Settings → Storage → Messages (i) will list all the attachments. Maybe some huge ones you don’t need or can save elsewhere (like in your NAS). Keep in mind that the usage is much larger – each message is on your Mac, iPhone, and iCloud, so you are actually using 400GB for this!
I keep my main photo library, with all the full downloads, on a little 2TB Samsung SSD that is always and automatically attached to my Mac whenever I’m at my desk. Unfortunately, this means that this isn’t available when I’m traveling but, really, I don’t need to lug around the entire library when I’m on the road. This works well for me. Pretty simple and uncomplicated. And I just find that my Photos library is the one thing that seems to continually grow beyond any reasonable bounds and is difficult or impossible to usefully prune. And of course this library is regularly backed up to a couple of other places (because I don’t want to place 100% trust in the cloud).
I am NOT an expert on Messages, but the way the following reads, I don’t think you have all of your messages stored on your Mac. At best they are just synced to iCloud, IMO.
" If you haven’t turned on Messages in iCloud, your messages are included in iCloud Backup. If you use Messages in iCloud, your messages automatically sync to iCloud so they aren’t included in your daily backup."
Padre,
I moved my 485GB Photos storage to an external SSD and other videos to their own external drive. That freed up a lot of space. If I was you, I’d start with the obvious: You mentioned iCloud drive but I didn’t see the size mentioned, but if it is enough to handle your Photos library, then definitely move that library to an external and make sure your photos are being synced to iCloud. I have an MBP so when I’m mobile, I still have access to the Photos library via icloud.com or just on my phone. That isn’t an issue for you with a desktop, but if you ever switch to laptop, you’ll still have access if you need it.
I also noticed that I had some big Archives and other zip files that I don’t need on my internal drive, so I set them to store on iCloud only.
Many other space saving steps to take (Messages 135GB!!!) but the above took care of the bulk of my storage concerns and I have a comfortable 404GB empty space on my 1TB internal SSD.
I’m a JBOD type, so I can’t comment on Synology (although I’d love to experiment with one - seems so much cleaner) but I assume you can offload big media stuff to that. Start there!
I created a Keyboard Maestro macro. Every 15 minutes, it asks Finder how much of my hard drive is in use. If it’s less than 80%, it doesn’t do anything. If it’s more than 80%, it pops up an alert dialog letting me know the percentage I have free.
Annoying? Occasionally, I suppose.
But it catches things that are spiraling in terms of usage, and typically it doesn’t take that long for me to fire up DaisyDisk and move some stuff to my external drive.
Another vote for moving your Photos library to an external drive. I use a 256 GB USB-C SSD (look for USB-C for better transfer speeds). From recollection, macOS Photos doesn’t like the library to be on a network drive so you can’t use the NAS as the primary place to store the library (but can obviously back up the USB drive to the NAS).
The drives have come down dramatically in price since many years ago when it would have been infeasible - the 256 GB one I have cost only £25. The only problem is that it’s so small (physically) that it’s easy to lose so we’ve attached an AirTag to it!
I’d be tempted to have a second notification a few percentage points away (the size of disk could advise how fa apart) so if both get triggered with a certain time of each other, you get an idea how quickly you’re using space.