MacOS – delete things safely from ~/Library

macosstorage

I am running out of storage space on my 2011 MacBook Air. I was thinking I should clean up before I contemplate adding more storage.

I notice though, that while I have ~30 GB in ~/Documents, ~2 in ~/Movies, ~10 ~/Pictures, I also have ~70 GB in the ~/Library folder.

What can I safely delete (if anything), and what is the best method to delete from this folder?

Here is the result of the cd ~/Library; du -sm * | sort -rn | head -16 script:

46559   Developer
26874   Application Support
23941   Mail
4822    Containers
2030    MobileDevice
1524    Logs
1430    Caches
1371    iTunes
1032    Mobile Documents
229     Safari
65      Dragon Profile.ddictateprofile
40      Keychains
35      Preferences
33      Internet Plug-Ins
29      Mail Downloads
26      Autosave Information

Best Answer

To see which folders inside ~/Library use most of the space, run something like

cd ~/Library; du -sm * | sort -rn | head -16

in Terminal which gives you the 16 folders using the most space.

Specific cleanup actions afterwards depend on the folders found.

Related Question