How to find large files on a Mac

On this page

1. Storage settings: Large Files
2. Finder: search by file size
3. Terminal: find every file over a size
4. Big files are rarely where the space went
5. What to look for, and what to leave alone
6. Spaceback's Large Files scanner

The quickest way is built in: open System Settings → General → Storage, click the info button (ⓘ) next to Documents, and look at Large Files. For a search you control, use Finder's File Size filter, or one find command in Terminal that lists every file over a size you choose.

All three find big single files. That matters less than you'd think. I'll come back to why at the end, because on my own Mac the biggest files explained only a small part of where the space went.

Storage settings: Large Files

In System Settings → General → Storage, wait for the bar to finish calculating, then click ⓘ beside Documents. macOS describes this screen as "Sort through documents and permanently erase files you no longer need." It has a few sections: Large Files, Downloads, Unsupported Apps and a File Browser that shows which folders use the most space.

Large Files is sorted by size, and each item can be shown in Finder. Apple doesn't document the size a file needs to reach before it appears in this list, so don't treat an empty list as proof that you have no big files.

Finder: search by file size

Finder's search can filter by size, though the option is hidden:

1. Open a Finder window and press Command-F.
2. Under "Search:", click This Mac, or the name of the folder you started in.
3. Click the first pop-up menu (it says Kind) and choose Other….
4. Select File Size in the list and click OK.
5. Set the row to File Size "is greater than" 1 GB (or 500 MB).

Switch to list view and click the Size column to sort. You can save the search with the Save button, which gives you a smart folder that stays up to date.

Finder search runs on Spotlight, and that has a cost: it only finds what Spotlight has indexed. On my Mac I ran the same query from Terminal, looking for files over 500 MB in my projects folder:

mdfind -onlyin ~/PersonalProjects 'kMDItemFSSize > 500000000'

It returned two zip files. It didn't return any of the five Git pack files over 500 MB in the same folder, the biggest of them 1.1 GB, because they live inside hidden .git folders and Spotlight left them out. Folders you've added to Spotlight's privacy list in System Settings are skipped too.

Terminal: find every file over a size

find doesn't depend on any index. It walks the folders you give it and checks every file. This lists files over 1 GB in your home folder, largest first, and changes nothing:

find ~ -xdev -type f -size +1G -exec du -h {} + 2>/dev/null | sort -hr

What each part does:

• -xdev stays on the startup disk, so it doesn't wander into external drives or network shares.
• -size +1G means more than 1 gibibyte (1,024 MB). Use +500M for a longer list. The units are in man find.
• du -h prints each file's size, and sort -hr puts the biggest first.
• 2>/dev/null hides the "Operation not permitted" lines for folders Terminal isn't allowed to read.

The first time, macOS will probably ask whether Terminal can access your Desktop, Documents and Downloads folders. You can say no, and those folders will simply be left out. To search one folder only, replace ~ with its path, for example ~/Movies.

On 15 October 2026 I ran it on my MacBook Air, leaving out the privacy-protected folders and ~/Library. It took 17 seconds. At 1 GB it found three files, all Git packs. At 500 MB it found seven: five Git packs and two zip archives of App Store screenshots I'd already uploaded. Together they come to about 5.5 GB.

Big files are rarely where the space went

Those seven files don't explain my disk. The projects folder they're in is 45 GB. One of its subfolders, the marketing folder for Spaceback, is 15 GB spread over 18,713 files, and only eight of them are over 100 MB, adding up to 1.5 GB. The rest is thousands of ordinary images, videos and build files, and no file-size search will ever show them to you.

So once the obvious big files are gone, look at folder sizes instead. This lists the folders inside a folder, biggest first:

du -hd1 ~/PersonalProjects 2>/dev/null | sort -hr | head

Run it again on the biggest folder it shows, and keep going down until you reach something you recognise. The File Browser in Storage settings does the same thing with clicks, and so do visual tools. GrandPerspective draws the disk as a map of rectangles and is free from its SourceForge page ($2.99 on the App Store, as of October 2026).

What to look for, and what to leave alone

The large files that are usually safe to remove are ones you made or downloaded yourself: screen recordings, exported videos, disk images (.dmg) you've already installed from, old zip archives, and "Install macOS" apps left over after an update.

Leave a big file alone when you can't say what it is. Git packs like mine hold a project's whole history, and deleting one breaks the repository. Virtual machine disks, Photos and Music libraries, and anything inside ~/Library belong to apps that expect them to be there. Remove those from inside the app that made them, or not at all.

Whichever tool you use, a file moved to the Trash still takes up space until you empty it.

Spaceback's Large Files scanner

I make Spaceback, and its Large Files scanner is in the free version. By default it looks at Downloads, Movies, Documents and Desktop, starts at 50 MB, and has filters for size (up to 1 GB+) and for age (3 months to 2 years since a file was last changed). What you select moves to the Trash, so you can put it back, and the space comes back when you empty the Trash. You don't need it for this, though: the find command above does the same job, and it isn't limited to the folders you've given an app access to.

Vlada Misici builds Spaceback, a storage cleaner for Mac and iPhone. Every number in these posts was measured on a real Mac, and every command was run before it went on the page. Found a mistake? Email vlada@queazy.app and it gets fixed.