This beautiful app will show you all the forgotten files that are slowing down your Mac

Rob PriceMay 21, 2016, 19:51 IST

MacBooks are fantastic - when they're not full of junk files.

Computers have transformed our desks - and not necessarily for the better.

Where previously workers had great stacks of paper and overflowing filing cabinets surrounding them, many offices are now going completely paper-free.

But replacing this clutter is near-infinite quantities of digital junk: Thousands of virtual folders containing every file you ever forgot you downloaded, quietly taking up space.

Three years-worth of old expense reports? Obsolete induction guides for offices you no longer work in? That hour-long video of the disastrous company all-hands meeting last year? It's all in your laptop somewhere, almost impossible to find and delete.

Luckily, there are apps out there that are a godsend for helping you map your hard drive so you can figure out what's taking up so much space. My favourite for Macs running OS X is called GrandPerspective, and it's free to download and use.

Here's how it works.

View As: One Page Slides

In short: GrandPerspective is a file visualiser. It scans your hard drive for you (or certain folders within it), and graphically shows you what's taking up so much space. Like this!

Pictured is my work laptop. Each box is an app or file — it'll tell you what it is when you move your mouse over it. It's all vividly-coloured to help you distinguish between things, and you can zoom in if you need to. My huge email archive takes up the most space by far.

In contrast, here's my personal MacBook.

The email archive is the same size, but the hard drive is bigger overall — so the emails pale in comparison next to my music collection.

Here's one more — one of my colleague's personal laptops.

Here's what some of that is.

Add Comment()

Comments ()

Characters Remaining: 3000

Next Story Tim Cook got the red carpet treatment during his last big trip