Freeing up space

Storage Studio frees space on your Mac's built-in disk in five ways: clearing things that rebuild themselves, moving files to your external drive, offloading apps, making cloud files online-only and releasing space held by automatic backups.

Smart Care is the one-tap tidy-up behind the Run Tuhi button on the Home screen. It looks at your Mac first, then runs only the safe steps that will actually help, and tells you afterwards what it freed.

Free Up Space runs your rules in one pass. It moves the files your rules pick out to your external drive, leaving a shortcut behind, and clears app caches that apps rebuild by themselves.

Storage Inspector, opened from What's Using Space, measures what is taking room on your Mac, what changed since last time and what your automatic backups are holding, and lets you move big folders to your external drive and back.

Storage Studio watches your free space all the time. When it falls quickly it works out which app or folder took it, warns you if you're heading for a full disk, and explains any stretch of the storage chart you select.

Emergency Space is for a disk that is full right now. It lists what you could free, safest options first, picks the smallest safe set that reaches your goal, keeps a copy of anything it removes, and can be stopped at any time.

macOS gives every app a hidden scratch area for temporary files. Sometimes an app leaves a lot behind there. Storage Studio finds those leftovers, groups them by the app that made them, and offers to clear only the ones nothing is using.

Deleted or moved files can keep taking space for a while: in the Trash, in your Mac's automatic local snapshots, or because an app still has them open. Storage Studio shows which one is happening and what you can do about it.

The Local Snapshots screen lists the automatic backups your Mac keeps on its own disk, shows which are already on your Time Machine drive, and lets you remove them or ask macOS to release a set amount of space.

Storage Studio clears only the parts of an app's data that the app rebuilds by itself, such as its web and graphics caches. An app's settings, sign-ins, cookies and history are never touched, for any app.

Storage Studio recognises the caches that common developer tools download or build, clears the ones that rebuild themselves, and offers to move large reusable developer data, such as simulators and Xcode archives, to your external drive.

Auto Rules are clean-up rules Storage Studio writes for your particular Mac. It looks for caches and clutter that are actually there, applies only the safest automatically, and asks you about the rest.

Rules tell Storage Studio which files to move to your external drive, and when, without you doing it by hand. They run once a day and whenever you run Free Up Space, and you can preview exactly what they would do first.

Optimise Cloud Storage makes cloud files that are already downloaded to your Mac online-only. They stay in your cloud account and download again when you open them, and the space they took on your Mac comes back.

Storage Studio records your free space once an hour and draws it as charts in your Storage Profile. You can see how free space has changed, how much of your data lives on your external drive, and what moved in and out each day.

Your Storage Profile is a picture of how this Mac is used: what you store, what you actually work on, where it all lives, your connected cloud accounts, and suggestions that each open the right Storage Studio tool.

Storage Studio checks its own files on your Mac first. It keeps its small, essential records, tells you plainly when it is holding something large it could clear, and keeps bigger things such as its own backups on your external drive.

How to see what a clear-up will do before it starts, stop one safely part-way, and find out afterwards exactly what was moved or removed and how to put it back.

Files in the Trash still take up space. Storage Studio shows how much your Trash is holding, but leaves emptying it to you, because that can't be undone. The one exception is a default rule that clears items left in the Trash for more than 30 days, which you can switch off.

Job Insights shows every job Storage Studio runs in the background on one screen, one card per job, with when it last ran, whether it's healthy, and any problems explained in plain English.