While we work as developers we are constantly downloading, installing, moving and changing files on our drive. This results to populating the drive to its limit, at least in my case. In this article I will show you two tools that I use on my Mac to detect and free the used storage.

DevCleaner

DevCleaner is a great macOS app for freeing the storage used by Xcode. It is developed by Konrad Kołakowski and it is available on Mac App Store and GitHub.

The app allows you to clean device support files from development phones, build archives, derived data, documentation cache and old simulator & device logs. I found it really useful to quickly free the data that I don’t need.

GrandPerspective

GrandPerspective is a compact macOS utility that visually represents disk usage in a file system. It aids in disk management by allowing you to quickly identify the files and folders consuming the most space. The visualization employs a tree map, where each file is depicted as a rectangle, its size proportional to the actual file size. Files within the same folder are grouped together, but their placement is otherwise random.

It is developed by Erwin Bonsma. More info can be found on its SourceForge page.

This app helped me a lot of times to identify what is taking up my drive space. It is very simple to use. When opening the app you pick the base folder from where the scanning will start and after the scanning is done you will get a view with rectangular blobs showing what takes your disk space. I often choose the root (/) folder for the scanning so that I can see all the files on my computer.

If you have any other tips or apps for freeing storage please leave them in the comments. I hope that this article helped you to understand what takes up the space on your macOS computer.