Your Storage Profile

Your Storage Profile is a picture of how this Mac is used: what kinds of files you keep, which ones you actually work on, and where they all live, on this Mac, your external drive or in the cloud. From that it suggests what would help, and each suggestion opens the Storage Studio tool that does it. Nothing happens automatically.

Open it from the More menu (•••) → Storage Profile….

"This Mac is a…"

The top of the window names the kind of Mac this is, with a sentence about why:

• Media Keeper: mostly photos, video and audio
• Developer: mostly code and data sets
• Creative Pro: mostly design files
• Document Worker: mostly documents
• Archivist: mostly archives and disk images
• Light User: very little stored and very little opened
• All-Rounder: no one kind clearly leads

It weighs what you store and what you've opened recently, and gives more weight to what you open, because that says more about how the Mac is really used. It's a description, not a judgement, and it never suggests deleting your files. Click Refresh to read your Mac again.

%% caption: How the Storage Profile is put together
flowchart TD
  A[What's stored, by kind] --> C[Profile name]
  B[What you've opened recently] -->|counts for more| C
  A --> D[Suggestions for this Mac]
  B --> D
  E[Where it lives: Mac, drive, cloud] --> D
  D --> F[Each suggestion opens a Storage Studio tool]

The sections

• What you actually work on: how many files you've opened recently compared with how many you store, and Where your work happens, the folders those files are in.
• What’s stored: your files grouped by kind, such as photos, documents and code.
• Where it lives: how your storage splits across On this Mac, External drive and Cloud.
• Connected cloud accounts: each cloud account linked to this Mac, with its usage read live from the provider. Analyze files & activity looks inside an account and reports numbers only, such as how many files there are, how many were changed recently and how many are online-only. No file names are shown or kept.
• Biggest space-users: the largest files on this Mac. A downloaded cloud file here has a Free up button that makes it online-only. See Optimise Cloud Storage Locally.
• Suggestions for this Mac: up to five, ranked by how much they'd help, for example freeing duplicate files, moving rarely-used files off your Mac, optimising cloud storage, protecting your work with a backup, or clearing caches. Each has an Open button.
• Storage Studio’s footprint: how much memory, processor time and disk the app itself is using. See How much space Storage Studio itself uses.
• Your storage over time: the storage charts. See Storage charts and history.

When Apple Intelligence is available, an insight near the top is written on your Mac, marked powered by Apple Intelligence and on-device.

Privacy

The profile is built on your Mac. File names, folder names, what you've opened and what's inside your cloud accounts stay on this Mac.

Storage Studio does send our servers a small summary of numbers so we can understand how the app is used across Macs: the profile name, a rough count of your files and the share you've opened recently, rough percentages (such as how your storage splits between this Mac, the drive and the cloud, and the mix of file kinds), which features you use, the app's own footprint, and for each connected cloud account its type, the space used and, if you've analysed it, file counts. Account email addresses and file names are never included. See What leaves your Mac, and when.

See also: Where did my space go? · Finding and removing duplicates · Cloud accounts · Privacy: what stays on your Mac