Clean up, back up
KEEPING OLD FILES won’t slow down your Mac; it just ignores them. But you’ll have problems if your drive gets close to full. Auto defragmentation will start to struggle, macOS may not have room to swap data while multitasking, and apps that use “scratch disk” space will run out. You’ll need a few extra gigabytes to download and install Catalina, so it’s a good time to make room.
Use a Finder search (see “Find and delete large files”, below) to
