Chosen Solution
Mac HD drive nearly full in ‘documents’ ‘Large Files’ area with ‘disk image’, ‘AVI movie’, ‘DV movie’, etc. ‘Manage’ option seems to do nothing. Move to iCloud seems to do nothing. Seems there is no option to download all to external drive, only option is to delete. How does one clear ‘Large Files’, ‘Downloads’ or ‘File Browser’ (or even mess with the latter?). Or, if you delete these does it delete every other placed its stored? Appreciate any help.
Mojave leaves a ghost image of your files & folders. Here you can see the little cloud icon.
So it can be confusing if the file is real or just a pointer. The first thing I would do is get a big external drive one that’s at least twice as large as your internal drive, three times would be even better! That way you can make a backup and have enough space to maintain a good rolling backup. To backup you’ll want to use TimeMachine which you’ll find in your systems Preferences. Make sure you use Disk Utility to format the drive to GUID if it’s not already setup for macOS before you start using it. Once you’ve got your internal drive backed up you can go in and clean off your stuff you clearly don’t need. You’ll likely want to use an app to help you sort out your data to decide what can be trashed. I do recommend getting a good HDD drive tool like Drive Genius to make sure the drive its self is healthy. If you have a SSD drive you’ll want to make sure you leave at least 1/4 of the drive unused. Unlike HDD’s SSD can get into trouble when the drive is running with very little free space.
