macOS · External Drives
2 TB of things
you can’t identify.
An external drive is where files go when you have not decided what to do with them. A Time Machine sparsebundle from a laptop you no longer own. A folder copied wholesale off an old machine. Four versions of a video export. Then one day it is full, and Get Info will size one folder at a time.
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Why cleaning one is harder than it should be
Finder will not tell you where the space went
Get Info on a folder works, one folder at a time, and 2 TB is not a folder-at-a-time problem. Without size by directory, sorted, you are guessing — and deleting from an unmeasured drive is how people remove the only copy of something.
Whole-machine copies are the biggest and the most dangerous
The folder someone copied off an old Mac before wiping it. Usually the single largest consumer on the drive, and the one you cannot delete wholesale, because somewhere inside is the thing you kept it for.
The drive has its own Trash, and you have forgotten it
Deleting from an external drive in Finder moves the file into a hidden .Trashes folder on that drive, still consuming the space. People who delete and then unplug leave gigabytes behind and never see them again.
Formatting it before handing it on does not erase it
A quick erase in Disk Utility writes a fresh directory structure and leaves your data in place, recoverable with free software. The three-second runtime is the giveaway.
What VaultSort does with it
Size by folder, in one look
A storage breakdown that turns 2 TB into three folders and some noise. Almost always the top three hold most of the drive, and once you can see that, the decisions make themselves.
The large files, listed
Video exports, disk images, sparsebundles and archives, ranked by what they cost you. The fastest gigabytes back are usually a dozen files rather than a thousand.
Duplicates matched against your current Mac
Content-based matching is what makes an old whole-machine copy tractable: most of it is already on your laptop, and what is genuinely unique turns out to be a handful of folders. Nothing is deleted by default — duplicates move to a folder you nominate.
Bookkeeping folders are skipped, not scanned
.Trashes, .Spotlight-V100, .fseventsd and .DocumentRevisions-V100 are filesystem business rather than yours, so they never clutter the results.
Free-space overwriting, for a drive that is staying
Fills unallocated space so files deleted from the drive long ago cannot be recovered from what was left behind.
Whole-drive erase, for a drive that is leaving
The complete answer when the device itself is being sold or retired, with progress reported in real bytes — and it is a slow job, so knowing that before you start is the point.
What it does not do yet
- — macOS exposes no per-volume TRIM an application can invoke. On an external SSD, that makes whole-drive erase and encryption carry more weight here than overwrite passes do — this is one of the few places the Windows build can do something this one cannot.
- — FileVault status is only reported for the internal startup disk, because that is all the system tool covers. An encrypted external drive will not show its state here.
- — Scanning over USB or Thunderbolt is bounded by the drive, not by the software. A full hash pass across a nearly full 2 TB spinning disk is a long job — start it and leave it.
- — An external drive is not a backup. Nothing here changes that, and a drive in a drawer is a single copy of everything on it.
Questions people ask
What order should I do this in?
Measure first. Then deduplicate against your current Mac, then delete the obvious categories, then empty that drive’s Trash while it is still mounted. Erase last, and only if the drive is leaving.
Can I clean a drive formatted for Windows?
exFAT and FAT32 drives mount natively and are fine. An NTFS drive mounts read-only on macOS without third-party support, so nothing — VaultSort included — can remove anything from it until that is in place.
Can I delete a Time Machine backup from an external drive?
Through Time Machine, yes. Not by dragging it to the Trash: a sparsebundle or a backup volume has structure that Time Machine maintains, and removing parts of it by hand produces a backup that looks present and is not.
The drive is being sold. What do I run?
A whole-drive erase, not a quick format, and budget the time — roughly one full write of the device per pass. If the volume was encrypted, destroying the key is far quicker than overwriting the disk.
Try it on your own files
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