What the two prompts give you
- A map before any change: what fills your disk, how big each thing is, when you last touched it and what could happen to it.
- Four piles: things that come back by themselves, copies, old work, and the work you are doing right now, which stays where it is.
- A move with proof: old work goes to your cloud drive, each file is compared with its copy, and only after that does the original go in the Trash.
Why the map comes first
A full disk makes you want to delete something right away, and that is how the wrong folder goes. A map changes nothing. You see what takes the room, and you decide afterwards, with sizes and dates in front of you.
What happened on my Mac
At the end of October my Mac had 3.8 GB left of 228 GB. Caches of about 14 GB went first, because they come back by themselves when they are needed. Build files that can be restored with one command, 17.8 GB, went too. Then the old projects: 23 items, 37.7 GB, 1 180 files, up to Google Drive through its API, with no desktop app, in about 11 hours while I kept working.
Each file was checked by checksum, and only after that did the originals go in the Trash. On 31 October the Mac had 84 GB available. That number has moved since, because working projects grow. The two prompts put those steps in writing, so you can start in the same order.
The part I got wrong
Claude refused to empty the Trash. It said that was my job. I asked if it was all there, and it started checking again and asked me to wait. I emptied it anyway.
It kept going: it downloaded 6 archives back, read them to the end with 0 errors, and listed what was not in the cloud. Don't copy me on this one. After an early empty there is no going back for anything that wasn't in the cloud.
What stays in the full guide
Part 1 gives you both prompts and the checks around them. Claude Code works out the upload with you, on your own machine. How to plan a long upload, and what to do when one stops halfway, is in the full guide.
Who this guide is for
Anyone whose Mac says the disk is almost full, and anyone with years of old projects on it. You need no technical background: you paste text, read a table and say yes or no to what it suggests.