Guides

Reclaiming disk space on a developer Mac, one cache at a time.

• Free disk space on a developer Mac: the 10 biggest wins Ranked by gigabytes recovered – start here.
• Is it safe to delete Xcode DerivedData? Yes, always – what it is, where it lives, what a delete costs you.
• Clear all Xcode caches safely – the complete map Device support symbols, archives, simulators, docs – with the one ⚠️ you shouldn't blindly delete.
• Delete old iOS simulator runtimes 5-8 GB per runtime, removed safely via simctl.
• Find and delete every node_modules on your Mac One find command to list them all, plus the global npm/pnpm/yarn caches.
• Docker is eating your Mac's disk Pruning images, builder cache and volumes – and shrinking the VM file.
• “System Data” is huge – what it really is Apple's grey mystery bar, decoded for developer Macs.
• Time Machine local snapshots Why freeing 50 GB sometimes frees nothing, and the tmutil fix.
• Clear the Gradle cache ~/.gradle grows without limit – plus the Android SDK leftovers.
• Rust: target folders and the cargo cache 20 GB target folders, the registry that never forgets, cargo sweep.
• Where AI models hide on your Mac Hugging Face, Ollama, LM Studio, PyTorch – 100+ GB of forgotten downloads.
• Python's disk footprint pip/uv/conda caches, forgotten virtualenvs, pyenv versions.
• brew cleanup, properly What it removes, the dry run, and the env var that automates it.
• Delete old iPhone backups from your Mac Tens of GB per device in MobileSync – including phones you sold.
• CocoaPods, SPM & Carthage caches pod cache clean, the SwiftPM cache, Pods and .build folders.
• Flutter disk cleanup flutter clean, .dart_tool, the pub cache – plus the iOS/Android layers.
• Clear Go's module and build caches go clean -modcache, the read-only permission gotcha, old toolchains.
• VS Code & JetBrains cache locations Indexes, workspaceStorage, and caches of IDE versions you removed.
• Slack, Discord, Teams & the Electron cache pile Every Electron app is a Chromium with its own multi-GB cache.