everyday mac tools

Why Documents takes up so much storage on a Mac

· 6 min read

In System Settings, General, Storage, Documents is the catch-all for your own files that no other category claims: downloads, videos, disk images, archives and old project folders, wherever they sit in your home folder. It is not the size of the Documents folder, which is why the two numbers rarely match. In most cases a handful of large files make up most of it, and the info button next to Documents lists them biggest first.

What Storage settings counts as Documents

The Storage screen sorts everything on the drive into categories. Several of them belong to a specific app or job: Photos counts the Photos library, Mail counts Mail’s data, Messages counts message attachments, Applications counts installed apps, and System Data collects caches, logs and other working files that macOS and apps keep for themselves. What System Data is on a Mac covers that one.

Documents is what is left of your own files once those are taken out. It includes the Documents folder, but also the Desktop, Downloads and any other folders you have made in your home folder. The usual heavyweights are:

  • Installers left in Downloads: disk images, packages and zip archives from apps you installed long ago. Can you delete DMG files after installing an app answers whether they are needed.
  • Video: screen recordings on the Desktop, exported projects, downloaded films and recordings of calls.
  • Disk images and virtual machines, which are often a single file of tens of gigabytes.
  • Archives you made by hand, such as a zip of an old Mac’s home folder that was meant to be temporary.
  • Copies of the same thing in several places. Find duplicate files on a Mac without deleting the wrong copy covers how to be sure.
  • Project folders, including developer folders full of downloaded dependencies.

Two things move files out of Documents. If your Desktop and Documents folders sync with iCloud Drive, that space may be listed under iCloud Drive instead. And files that belong to another account on the Mac are counted under Other Users & Shared, not under yours; what the Other Users and Shared category means explains it.

Look inside the Documents category

macOS will show you what is in there, sorted by size:

  1. Open the Apple menu, System Settings, then General, Storage.
  2. Give it a minute to calculate. The bar at the top fills in category by category.
  3. In the list below the bar, click the info button next to Documents.
  4. The sheet that opens has several views. Large Files lists your biggest files with their sizes. Downloads lists what is in the Downloads folder. Unsupported Apps lists older apps that no longer run on your version of macOS. File Browser lets you step through your folders with their sizes shown.

Large Files is the one to start with. Sorting by size usually explains most of the number within the first dozen rows.

You can delete straight from this sheet. If you would rather keep the Trash as a safety net, note the name, find the file in Finder and move it to the Trash there instead, so a mistake can still be undone until you empty it.

Find the big files from Finder or Terminal

Finder can do the same search with more control. Open a Finder window, press Command-F, set the search to This Mac, then change the first criterion to Other, choose File Size, and set it to greater than 1 GB. How to search for files by size on a Mac walks through it, including how to save the search.

For a folder-by-folder picture, switch a Finder window to list view, choose View, Show View Options and turn on Calculate all sizes. Show folder sizes in Finder explains why those figures can surprise you.

In Terminal, this lists the folders in your home folder from smallest to largest:

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

Then look inside the biggest one, for example:

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

macOS may ask whether Terminal can access your Desktop, Documents or Downloads folder the first time. Check disk space from the Terminal with df and du covers the rest of these commands.

What to clear first, and what to leave

Your own files do not regenerate. Anything you delete from Documents is gone unless it is in a backup, so it is worth a quick Time Machine backup before a big clear-out. With that done, the safest order is:

  1. Installers for apps you have already installed.
  2. Downloads you have already filed somewhere else, or never needed past the day you downloaded them.
  3. Duplicates, once you have confirmed which copy to keep.
  4. Old screen recordings and exports, after keeping the few you want.
  5. Disk images and virtual machines you no longer use. Open them first; an old one is sometimes the only copy of something.

Leave anything you cannot identify until you know what it is. If a file sits in a folder synced with iCloud Drive, deleting it on the Mac deletes it from iCloud and from your other devices too.

After you delete, empty the Trash. If the free space still does not move, emptied the Trash but the Mac got no space back explains the usual reasons, including local snapshots and purgeable space.

A whole-Mac view with Crumb

The Storage screen groups things in ways that do not always match how you think about your files. Crumb is a Mac menu bar disk cleaner that audits the whole Mac, not just your home folder. Its read-only audit is free and shows where the space has gone, including the parts Storage settings lumps together: System Data broken into caches, logs, swap and leftovers, Time Machine local snapshots, iOS backups, and which account on a shared Mac is using the space.

For files that live under Documents, the paid version ($9 once, up to two Macs) adds Duplicates for finding and removing copies and Organize for tidying a messy folder such as Downloads by type. Ask Crumb lets you point at a file you do not recognize; it explains what the item is, whether it regenerates and what breaks if it is gone, then proposes a plan, and nothing is deleted until you approve it. What no tool can decide for you is whether you still need a particular video or archive. The value here is seeing everything in one place before you choose.

Questions

Is it safe to delete the files listed under Documents? Nothing in macOS depends on them, so removing them will not break the system. They are your own files, though, and nothing brings them back except a backup.

Why is Documents so much bigger than my Documents folder? The category covers your files across the whole home folder, including Desktop and Downloads, not just the one folder with that name.

Why did the Documents number drop but free space hardly changed? The files are probably still in the Trash, or held by Time Machine local snapshots until macOS needs the room. See purgeable space on a Mac.