Freeing 100+ GB of storage on macOS using Codex
I still use the MacBook Air M2 with 16 GB of RAM and only 256 GB of storage, and it was working perfectly fine for my use case until recently. I started getting the low storage warnings sometimes, and that annoyed me a lot. And I was about to factory reset my laptop... but then at the last moment, I decided to ask Codex about it, and glad that I did.
Codex helped me free more than 100 GB of storage by deleting unnecessary stuff that were there from some apps that I used and deleted earlier. For example, I once tried a local model via Hugging Face and LM Studio and they were together taking 35 GB of storage. Similarly, I tried a Docker alternative called Colima and it was taking another 19 GB, as you see in the screenshot here.
It also gave me suggestion to remove folders from the ~Library/Application Support/* from apps which were not used or not installed on my system anymore. From here, you can see that I try a lot of applications like browsers and so on.
The screenshots you see above, is from an HTML file that I asked Codex to create after analyzing my laptop in detail. And it created a complete checklist with all the information that I can do to optimize my laptop. It did a great job.
Now, the funny thing is I earlier used Mole and even subscribed to the CleanMyMac app and there also weren't able to free these unnecessarily occupied storage. I tried them a few times, and they only cleared a maximum of 5-10 GB storage.
Another funny thing is, I have used Linux for years in the past and I know about the file systems a bit. But I have become lazy ever since I started using macOS (I love my MacBook though) and didn't even bother to check those folders. But after Codex gave suggestions, I went and deleted unnecessary folders and files by myself, and cleared over 100 GB of storage.
Life's good now!
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