I already wrote about how I freed up a lot of space on my Mac by clearing the Xcode cache. There is even a special program DevCleaner for Xcode, which I use now.
But, as time went on, and the disk space slightly decreased and decreased. Even though I was cleaning the Xcode cache, logs and other stuff. At some point, the Other section began to occupy more than 200 GB! Googled. Recommended to start in safe mode and restart 🤷♂️. Yes, it did not help at all, maybe a couple of hundred megabytes were released. I downloaded MacCleaner and looked at what’s wrong …
- Removed caches of some old apps in ~/Library/Caches (I don’t know why OS doesn’t clean it by itself)
- Removed all folders of useless apps in ~/Library/Application Support
- Removed Xcode at all and folders linked to it (after all process, installed again)
- Etc
Was freed up a little, but still, the Other section was huge. Then, I launched Disk Expert from the same MacCleaner bundle and went looking for more. And in the system! directories there were two folders — 35 GB each: com.apple.Developer and com.apple.AppStore. Googled about them… I was not alone :) There were some caches of old apps, Xcode again, and a lot of other things. Deleted all of them.
Then, I also launched App Cleaner & Uninstaller, this app, as I understand it, removes the application and all its caches, services, temporary folders, logs, etc. In short, what Uninstall does in Windows. Therefore, the statement that in MacOS it is enough to remove the program from the Applications folder is a lie. It doesn’t work like that.
Also, there is a OmniDiskSweeper app. Really simple and useful. It shows all directories, files and its sizes.
Total: restart, everything works fine and +90 GB free space.
This article is translation from my blog: https://mopsicus.ru. I will try to translate and write here more often if you like post as this.
