If you are a heavy Mac user, you may see an error appear making you aware that your start-up disk is full. This isn’t unusual and occurs to many users who store a lot of files and applications on their Macbook. Essentially, a disk full error is letting you know that your Apple Mac storage is full and that you should delete some files in order to clear up space.
There are a number of areas to look at when deleting files on your device. Deleting files from your trash and downloads folder is a good place to start. Reviewing your downloaded applications and deleting old emails are two other areas to look into. Below we look into four ways to fix a startup disk full error on a Mac.
Delete files from your downloads folder
One of the first places we would advise checking when reducing your storage on your Apple Mac is your downloads folder. If, like us, you download a lot of things and forget you have downloaded them, to then redownload them, then you will most likely find you have a lot of duplicate files stored. Try and review this folder and remove any duplicates that you have. Also, delete the files that you no longer require anymore. If there are files that you do need, move these to a designated folder within my documents, this way you can clear out your downloads completely.
Delete old applications
We are all guilty of downloading many applications that we think we will use but have never actually opened since being downloaded or only used once. This can take up a lot of storage on your mac unnecessarily. Just like reviewing your downloads folder, take a moment to review your installed applications as well. Anything you are unsure of deleting, delete anyway as you can always reinstall it in the future if you need it.
Delete old emails
You may not be aware of this but your emails take up storage space on your laptop. If you have your business emails on your Mac, this could be draining your storage – especially if you receive attachments regularly. Take a moment to look through your emails deleting the ones you no longer need. Try to delete your junk and order your inbox by size that way you are deleting the emails that take the most storage. If you have an email that you want to keep that has attachments, you could remove the files and keep the email to refer to at a later date. When deleting emails, make sure you delete your deleting items after as they still take up space until removed from that folder.
Use cloud storage
If your device is full and you don’t want to delete files, use cloud storage instead. This way you can move your files off your device freeing up space and then access them from your cloud storage when required. Cloud storage is very affordable and easy to set up, many major companies offer cloud storage like Microsoft or Apple.
