everyday mac tools

Find the largest files on a Mac

· 6 min read

macOS already keeps a list of your largest files: System Settings, General, Storage, then the small information button beside Documents, then the Large Files tab. For anything more specific, Finder’s Cmd-F search takes a size criterion, and Terminal’s du ranks folders rather than files. The hard part is rarely finding the big things; it is working out which of them are safe to remove.

The list macOS already keeps

Start here, because it takes thirty seconds and it covers the case that sends most people searching.

  1. Open System Settings, then General, then Storage.
  2. Wait for the colored bar at the top to finish calculating. On a full disk this takes a minute or two.
  3. Click the information button next to Documents.
  4. Use the tabs across the top. Large Files lists your biggest files with size, kind and the date each was last opened. Downloads is usually where the surprises are. File Browser walks your home folder with a size beside every entry, so you can drill into whichever folder is fattest.
  5. Select anything you are sure about and use the delete button in that sheet.

The Last Accessed column is the useful one. A 4 GB video you have not opened in three years is a different proposition from a 4 GB project file you touched yesterday.

Two limits to know. This list covers your home folder, not the whole disk, so files in shared locations or another user’s account never appear. And it counts files, which means the categories that most often eat a disk are missing from it entirely. More on those below.

Search by size in Finder

Finder’s search gives you the same list with your own threshold, and can search a specific drive rather than the startup disk.

  1. Open a Finder window, and if you want to search one drive or folder, open that first. Press Cmd-F.
  2. Choose the scope under the search field: This Mac, or the folder name button.
  3. Click the plus button, set the first pop-up to File Size, the second to is greater than, then type a number and pick MB or GB.
  4. Press Cmd-2 for List view, right-click a column heading, and switch on Size. Click the Size heading to sort by it.
  5. Add a second criterion row of System files, set to are included, if you want results from inside your Library folder.

Combining size with a type filter is where this gets precise: a File Size row plus a Name ends with row finds every video file above a gigabyte, and Find files by extension on a Mac covers the extension side of that.

Searching This Mac relies on the Spotlight index, so anything on the Spotlight privacy list stays invisible here. Scoping the search to a folder makes Finder walk it directly instead, which is slower and does not care about the index.

Rank folders instead of files

When no single file is enormous but a folder has quietly grown to 90 GB, du is the right tool. In Terminal:

du -sh ~/* | sort -h

That prints each item in your home folder with a human-readable size, smallest first, so the answer is the last line. Then descend into whichever folder won:

du -sh ~/Library/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h

For files rather than folders, find filters by size directly:

find ~ -type f -size +500M -exec du -h {} + 2>/dev/null | sort -h

+500M means larger than 500 megabytes; +2G works too. The 2>/dev/null suppresses permission warnings from folders Terminal cannot read.

One thing that confuses people running du against the whole disk: on current macOS the startup disk is presented as a read-only system volume plus a separate data volume, mounted together. Totals taken from / can look wrong or double up because of that. Run du inside your home folder, or against /System/Volumes/Data, and the numbers behave.

The big things that are not files

This is why the disk stays full after an afternoon of deleting.

  • The Trash. Nothing is freed until it is emptied.
  • Local Time Machine snapshots. macOS keeps recent backup snapshots on the internal disk and releases them when space runs short. tmutil listlocalsnapshots / shows them. This is most of what “purgeable” space means.
  • iPhone and iPad backups, in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup, often tens of gigabytes each.
  • Photos and Mail libraries, which are packages: single items in Finder holding thousands of files. Manage them from inside Photos and Mail, never by deleting parts of the package.
  • Developer leftovers: build artifacts, simulator runtimes, package manager caches under ~/Library/Caches and ~/Library/Developer.
  • Container disk images used by virtualization tools, which are single sparse files whose apparent size is usually much larger than the space they actually occupy.

If that whole category is your real problem rather than a few oversized videos, Crumb audits the whole Mac read-only and breaks System Data into its parts, including snapshots and backups, before anything is removed. It does not repair disks or recover deleted files.

Finding big files fast on a full disk

Everywhere catalogs every filename on the Mac once and answers as you type, with a size: operator you can combine with ext: and path: to ask for large files of one type in one place. Cmd-Return reveals a result in Finder so you can see what else is in that folder before deciding, and Cmd-Delete moves it to the Trash.

It also lists files on an external drive that is not currently connected, dimmed, naming the drive to plug in, which answers the “did I already move that off the laptop” question without hunting for the enclosure. Files on an unplugged external drive covers that habit properly. What it does not do is read file contents or judge what is safe to delete; it shows you names, paths and sizes.

Before you delete anything large

A short discipline that prevents the expensive mistakes.

  1. Check the date it was last opened. Old and large is the safe combination.
  2. Select it and press Cmd-I. The Get Info panel tells you the kind, and Open With tells you what claims it.
  3. Look for other copies first, because deleting the wrong one of a pair is the usual regret. Find every copy of a file on a Mac covers proving two files are genuinely identical.
  4. Move rather than delete: put candidates in one folder for a week, then empty it.
  5. Leave anything inside ~/Library alone unless you know what created it.

Questions

Why did deleting 30 GB not free 30 GB? Either it is still in the Trash, or local Time Machine snapshots are still holding the blocks that file used. Snapshots thin out on their own when the disk gets tight, so free space often appears an hour later without you doing anything.

Where did the old Storage Management window go? It became System Settings, General, Storage on Ventura and later. The same lists are there, one layer deeper.

How do I find the largest files on an external drive? Open the drive in Finder, press Cmd-F, and switch the scope from This Mac to the drive’s name before adding a File Size criterion. Storage settings only reports the startup disk. In Terminal, run du -sh /Volumes/DriveName/* | sort -h.

Is it safe to delete large files from the Caches folder? Caches regenerate, so a cache folder is usually recoverable ground, but do it with apps closed and expect the next launch of something to be slow while it rebuilds. Do not delete things you cannot identify just because they are large.