139 GB of "other" on my hard drive

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My 250GB MBP hard drive only has 50GB left free. I was deleting some old files trying to free up some hard drive space. I noticed that the largest part of what was on my hard drive was marked as "other." What is under this category and can it be deleted?
 

bobtomay

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No, it can't be deleted. Unless maybe you "want" to delete the operating system.

Everything that is not in one of the listed categories is in the "other" category.

All your system files, documents, spread sheets, preferences, mail, contacts and anything else you can think of that is not music, movies, photos and apps. See here for a longer list.

Not to say there wouldn't be some things in that "other" category that can be deleted, but you better know what it is you're deleting.
 
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So the operating system is taking up half of the hard drive?
 
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No but other could mean anything, if you really want to see what is sucking up space try using Disk Inventory X

Disk Inventory X
 
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Type in the following: (change orange text to your user account name)

cd /Users/"your account name here" return

nohup du -sh * > /Users/"your account name here"/Desktop/space.txt &

Wait about 2 or 3 minutes then open the file space.txt which should be on your desktop. You'll see a list of the sub directories and the amount of space they are using.

example:

4.0K #.profile#
1.3G ATVimage
16K Application Support
8.0K Applications
7.7G Desktop
100G Documents
8.0K Downloads
52K Emergency Records.edf
8.0K Faxes
4.0K IEC 61966-2.1 Default RGB .icc
19G Library
17G Movies
38G Music
4.0K NavisphereLocale.xml
4.0K NavisphereNAPersistence.xml
18G Pictures
0B Profiles
2.8M Public
632K Sites
24K Total Solar Eclipse 8:21:17
28M Utilities
20K emc
64K shsh
36K umbrella0.log

typically you can remove items from the directories in bold above. If you know how to use terminal with root access, you can see the rest of the disk. If not then it's too dangerous to venture there without knowing what you're doing.
 

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