Low Hard Drive Space
If your computer gives you an alert about low hard drive space, you may need to clear out some files. On a Mac, click on the magnifying glass icon in the upper right and type in “Storage Management”, then open up that app. On the left will be a series of options like Applications and Documents that state the space being taken up by these things. Click on them and they’ll give you suggestions on possible candidates for deletion, like unsupported apps or particularly large files.
Below these options will be these greyed-out statistics for macOS and System Data. You won’t be able to mess with these, but it can be useful to look at them. In particular, if your System Data appears extremely large (more than 30GB or so), there may be a serious issue at play. First, try rebooting your computer and checking Storage Management again; if System Data is still abnormally large, send an email to the IT Helpdesk ([email protected]) with your room number, explaining the issue.
Google Drive can be helpful when clearing space on your hard drive. Consider if there are files you can move to Google Drive. Additionally, check if any of your important files are already on Google Drive; if they are present in both Google Drive and your hard drive, you may be able to remove them from your hard drive.
If you are attempting to decompress a zip file and there is insufficient space, the error message may read “unable to finish expanding” or similar.
When looking for files you can remove, do not look into system files. Deleting or otherwise messing with these kinds of files can seriously impair your computer.
