My MacBook Air M2 has recently told me, that my storage is almost full. Well, I checked it out in the settings, where we can see how much is occupied, how much left, etc. Here i saw, that applications take up 182,95 GB. In finder, Macintosh HD shows that “Applications” folder takes up only 42,3 GB. How can i fix this? I really don’t have applications which would take up 180+ GB .
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Air 15″, macOS 15.2
Those categories within the macOS Storage Management section refers to anything on the Mac which is considered an app regardless of their location. macOS includes some "apps" within the system areas, plus any macOS executable you may have downloaded or stored on the laptop in the home user folder will be part of this as well.
You either need to delete large files/folders that you don't need, or relocate the large files/folders to external media. Look through your Desktop, Documents, and especially Downloads folders. And don't forget to empty the Trash.
If your Photos, Music, and/or iMovie libraries are large, then you can relocate those large libraries to an external drive:
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support
Move your iMovie for Mac library - Apple Support
Keep in mind that it may take 24-48 hours before you will see the Free storage space increase after deleting or moving large amounts of data. Ignore the "Available" storage value as it is extremely misleading and is not synonymous with Free.
Those categories within the macOS Storage Management section refers to anything on the Mac which is considered an app regardless of their location. macOS includes some "apps" within the system areas, plus any macOS executable you may have downloaded or stored on the laptop in the home user folder will be part of this as well.
You either need to delete large files/folders that you don't need, or relocate the large files/folders to external media. Look through your Desktop, Documents, and especially Downloads folders. And don't forget to empty the Trash.
If your Photos, Music, and/or iMovie libraries are large, then you can relocate those large libraries to an external drive:
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support
Move your iMovie for Mac library - Apple Support
Keep in mind that it may take 24-48 hours before you will see the Free storage space increase after deleting or moving large amounts of data. Ignore the "Available" storage value as it is extremely misleading and is not synonymous with Free.
Thank you very much for your time.
I have a simulator that takes up around 110 GB of space. However, according to my calculations, I should have about 100 GB left. Is it possible that macOS is also including it in the Applications section?
The simulator was installed into a specific folder, along with its contents. The launcher itself is only about 50 MB.
Storage on APFS volumes is complicated.
The most important storage value is the Free space. This Free space value is only shown in Disk Utility or within the System Profiler. Unfortunately macOS shows the very misleading "Available" value everywhere.......and in this case it is not a synonymous with Free.
The "Used" storage space value is also unusual since some people may discover they are using more storage than the physical size of their drive due to a file copy feature of the APFS file system. Usually this discrepancy is only a problem when you copy or migrate to another drive or system.
I don't know what simulator you are using or how it may work. I'm not entirely sure what Apple considers an "application"....this is not something Apple likely even documents.
+1
Storage use discrepancy on MacBook Air M2
