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Apple has good reasons for keeping some files Use Invisible Files in Mac user. It’s hard to break something you can’t see. But sometimes you need to see those files or open the hidden /Library folder to fix something on your Mac that isn’t working right.
If you need more space on your Mac, you might think that deleting some of these hidden files is a good way to do so. In that case, How to Free Up Space on a Mac and How to Delete Other Storage on a Mac can help. How to delete system data on a Mac and How to delete cache on a Mac: If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t delete these hidden files.
Use Invisible Files in Mac
In Finder, you can click your hard drive under Locations, then open your Macintosh HD folder. Press Command + Shift + . (period) to make the hidden files appear. You can also do the same from inside the Documents, Applications, and Desktop folders. Anything your computer doesn’t want you messing with will be grayed out, but you can still take a peek inside. When you’re done, hit Command + Shift + . (period) to make the folders invisible again.
This will ensure you don’t accidentally change something in the future. You can also quickly access the ~/Library folder from Finder’s top menu. Click Go to see all the shortcuts for accessing the different folders inside your hard drive. However, if you hold down the Option key, there will be a new Library option with no shortcut visible. Click Library to view the content of the ~/Library folder.
On a computer, hidden files are ones that can’t be seen by the users. You can tell what kind of file is hidden by its name and its icon. First, the names of hidden files start with a dot (also called a period). The file icon is also see-through.
MacOS makes files that can’t be seen but are needed for the system to work. Applications also make hidden files, like cache files, log files, user preferences, and so on. The Library folder, which is also hidden, has most of them. These files can’t be seen because they need to be kept separate from files that the user makes and uses. But not all hidden files are important, and you can safely delete many of them.
Those of us who have been online long enough will remember the “Delete System32” hoax, in which trolls told naive PC users to delete their Windows 2000 system directory. Since then, it’s not surprising that developers have worked harder to hide files that are important to their operating systems.
So, some of the files that Apple hides on Mac are there for a reason. They are needed for macOS to work well, so you shouldn’t delete the hidden files that Mac needs to work right. There are, however, a lot of system files among those hidden items that just take up space and don’t do anything. All of them are in a folder called /Library.
FAQs
Some files and folders have special flags associated with them that tell the Finder not to display them. This behavior is inherited from older versions of Mac OS. Any file or directory that begins with a period ( . ) will be considered invisible by the Finder. This behavior is inherited from Unix.
GHO files might be able to be opened with Ghost Solution Suite (that link goes to Broadcom’s website, the current owners of the software), but there’s a good chance that program uses a newer format and doesn’t support GHO files anymore. A free alternative that’s more likely to work is Ghost Explorer.
The reason some files and folders are automatically marked as hidden is that, unlike other data like your pictures and documents, they’re not files that you should be changing, deleting, or moving around. These are often important operating system-related files. Both Windows and macOS computers have hidden files.