EtreCheckPro's storage display is designed to safely show you which folders are most responsible for your storage use. If you are running low on available storage, this display can help you identify which files can be safely deleted or archived to an external drive.
Each directory of your startup disk is shown divided into a pie chart where the sections are individual directories. The size and colour of each pie chart section are relative to the relative size of that directory in its parent directory. Move your mouse pointer over sections of the pie chart to see the size of that directory on disk instead of a percentage of the current directory size. Click on sections of the pie chart to further explore into sub directories. You can use the links in the current path at the top of the window to navigate to previous folders. Use the Reset button to return to the root directory of the startup disk.
Use the Open in Finder button to explore the current directory in the Finder and delete or archive files to external drives.
Note the following:
- Directories shown in blue have user-accessible file. These files are safe to access with the Open in Finder button. Other colours indicate that there are no user-accessible files. No Open in Finder button is shown for these directories.
- The root directory of your startup disk may show several special sections such as free space (in green), other volumes, and an unknown section (in red). Depending on various factors, not all disk space will be accessible by EtreCheckPro. Any discrepancy between total drive size, free drive space, and used space will show up as “Unknown”. Unknown space may include APFS local snapshots, compressed system files, other user accounts, and other locations protected by Apple security restrictions.
- Smaller directories that consume very little space will be grouped together and cannot be further explored.
- Packages such as applications and some internal folders will be inaccessible if it is not safe to access their internal files.
- EtreCheckPro does NOT read the contents of any files in the Storage display. It only looks at the sizes of files. Full Disk Access is only requires to prevent the system prompts which, if denied, could invalidate the results.
Clean up
You may be able to reduce the Unknown space by using the Clean up button. This may recover some storage space temporarily. Eventually, however, you may run low on free storage again.
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