The disk is full and there is nothing to delete. Where it actually went
When Finder shows a few gigabytes of files and macOS says the disk is full, the space is in four places Finder never shows you.
830 guides
Mac storage, explained.
What fills your disk, where it hides, and what is safe to remove. Every guide gives you a way to check it on your own Mac.
Safari's storage is in four places, and only one is the cache
Safari keeps caches, website data, offline reading copies and history in separate places. Which is large, which is safe to clear, and what clearing costs you.
Firefox on a Mac: old profiles are usually the reason it is large
Firefox keeps a folder per profile and never removes the old ones. Where they are, how to tell which is live, and what clearing the cache actually does.
Slack on a Mac keeps a cache per workspace, and never shrinks it
Slack stores caches, service worker data and downloads per workspace. Where they are, what quitting first changes, and what actually comes back.
Discord keeps three caches and every installer it ever downloaded
Discord's cache folders grow quietly and its updater leaves old builds behind. Where both live, and which one is actually worth clearing.
Teams on a Mac: two apps, two caches, and one of them is dead weight
A Mac that has had both the classic and the new Teams carries two full sets of data. How to tell which is live and clear the rest safely.
nvm on this Mac holds eight Node versions and 4.5 GB
Every Node version you ever installed is still there, and one of them is usually far larger than the rest. How to see which, and remove the dead ones.
Rust: the toolchain is 1.5 GB and the target folders are worse
A Rust install is large before you compile anything, and each project's target folder can beat it. What to clean, what to keep, and the commands for both.
Your .gradle folder keeps a copy of Gradle for every project
The wrapper downloads a full Gradle distribution per version, the caches hold every dependency, and daemon logs pile up. What each part costs.
Yarn Berry and pnpm keep a global store, and it is not the cache
Both package managers keep a shared store outside your projects. What is in it, what pruning removes, and why deleting it can break existing projects.
The AI coding tools on this Mac are using 12 GB in hidden folders
Every AI assistant installs a runtime, a model cache and a session history in a dotfolder nobody looks at. Measured numbers, and what is safe to clear.
The temp folder macOS never mentions, and why it is 2 GB
Every app writes to a per user temp folder with an unreadable name. What is in it, when macOS clears it, and why deleting it by hand is a bad idea.