See where your Mac's disk space really went

#Why the Storage settings only get you halfway

macOS has a storage overview under System Settings › General › Storage. It splits your disk into categories such as Applications, Documents and System Data and suggests a few cleanups. It's a good place to start, but it doesn't tell you which folders are large. If System Data shows a big number, you can't click through to see what's inside it. Our guide to System Data on a Mac explains what usually ends up there.

A disk space analyzer answers the next question: where, exactly, is the space?

#How a treemap shows your disk

Analyze draws your storage as a treemap. Every folder is a rectangle, and its area matches its size. Folders sit inside their parent folders, so the layout follows your disk's structure.

This works better than a sorted list for one reason: you see the whole disk at once. A large folder buried four levels deep is as easy to spot as one at the top level, so you don't need to know where to look. Click into the largest block to see what's inside, and keep going until you reach the files themselves.

#Why hardlink-aware matters

A hardlink is a second name for the same data on disk. Package managers, build tools and some backup systems use hardlinks to avoid storing the same file twice. An analyzer that adds up the size of every path counts that data once per link, and the total can come out larger than your disk.

Analyze is hardlink-aware: each piece of data is counted once. The numbers in the treemap add up to what's really on your disk, so the folder that looks biggest really is the biggest.

#What usually turns up

Every Mac is different, but a few things come up again and again when people first look at a treemap:

• Installers, archives and videos that have sat in Downloads for months.
• Video exports, photo libraries, virtual machine images and design files from projects you finished long ago.
• iPhone and iPad backups in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup.
• Xcode's derived data, simulators and package caches, which can quietly grow large. See developer caches on a Mac.
• Large Application Support folders left by apps you no longer use.

#From finding to freeing

Once you know where the space went, the right tool depends on what you found:

• Caches and logs belong in Clean, which knows each category's risk level and pre-selects only the low-risk ones. The cache guide lists them all.
• An app you don't need belongs in Apps, which removes the app together with its leftovers in your Library folders.
• Your own files are your call. Move them to an external drive, archive them, or delete them yourself.

When something does go through Freshist, the rules are the same everywhere: you see it first, and items from your user folder go to the Trash. Freshist won't move macOS system folders or your main personal folders themselves. The safety page has the details.

#Before you delete a big folder

A treemap makes large folders easy to find, which also makes it easy to delete the wrong thing in a hurry. A few questions are worth asking first:

• Is it yours or an app's? A large folder inside ~/Library usually belongs to an app, and removing it by hand can break that app. Removing the app with its leftovers is the cleaner route.
• Is it synced? Deleting a file in an iCloud Drive folder deletes it from your other devices too.
• Is there a copy? If it's a project you might need again, move it to an external drive or archive it before it leaves your Mac.
• Will it come back? Caches and build products are rebuilt as you work, so clearing them buys space for a while rather than for good.

#Seeing every folder

macOS hides some folders from every app until you grant it Full Disk Access. Without it, any disk analyzer will show less than what's really on your disk. The Help page explains how to grant it to Freshist.

#One license for the whole toolkit

Analyze isn't sold separately. It comes with Clean, Apps, Optimize and Status in a single license: $9 once, with lifetime updates, on up to 3 Macs, and a 14-day refund if it isn't for you. Scanning is always free. The app runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon and Intel, and sends no telemetry.