Unaccounted "Other" storage on

[jellychocrip]

Hi everyone,

My factory internal hard drive showing 112gb capacity is very full (screenshot below). When I click  > "About This Mac" >
"Storage", I can see that this figure is made up of ~14gb for apps, ~2gb for books, ~15gb for system and a whopping ~73gb for "Other" - trouble is I have no idea what this is.

In Storage Management I can see a large files than account for ~15gb, nowhere near the 73gb. The only thing I can think of is that I have a Photos Library which is stored on an external hard drive, but even then this is too large at 80gb.

Any assistance in retrieving this space would be much appreciated!

Thanks team

 

[MacInWin]

Welcome to the forum.

"Other" is a catch area for all things not in the categories identified. As such, it can be many things. My first suspect is always snapshots made by Time Machine or other backup applications. Do you have Time Machine turned on but the destination drive not attached? If so, when time comes for a backup to be made, a snapshot is taken. Eventually, when the backup drive is connected, those snapshots are used to "catch up" the backups that were missed while the target was not attached.

Another way to find what is in "Other" is to use something like DaisyDisk to do an analysis of your drive to tell you what is taking up a lot of space.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

...trouble is I have no idea what this is.

Here is what I would do.

First, I'd download:

Maintenance (free)

Titanium Software | Operating System Utilities for Mac - Maintenance

Maintenance is an operating system maintenance and cleaning utility for macOS that you can use to perform miscellaneous tasks of computer maintenance: run periodic scripts; rebuild the databases; delete application, font, and system caches; and more.

www.titanium-software.fr

I'd run Maintenance using the default settings. This will delete random log files, cache files, etc., and it may free up a surprising amount of space.

If, after running Maintenance you still have a large amount of hard drive space unaccounted for, this is what I would do...

- open a new Finder Window and choose List View
- open the window up wide enough to see the Size column
- if the size column is not present, then type Cmd-J to show options, check Size and Calculate all sizes, it may take a little time for sizes to be calculated.
- open up your Mac HD drive icon. There will be several folders: Applications, (System) Library, System and Users.
- sort by size by clicking on the header for the Size column, click on the little arrow in the Size header to sort from largest to smallest, Users should be the largest
- now drill down opening the largest folders to find out what is using your disc space

You may find that you have a large Spotlight database, or a false clone, or a bad iDisk sync.

 

[jellychocrip]

Welcome to the forum.

"Other" is a catch area for all things not in the categories identified. As such, it can be many things. My first suspect is always snapshots made by Time Machine or other backup applications. Do you have Time Machine turned on but the destination drive not attached? If so, when time comes for a backup to be made, a snapshot is taken. Eventually, when the backup drive is connected, those snapshots are used to "catch up" the backups that were missed while the target was not attached.

Another way to find what is in "Other" is to use something like DaisyDisk to do an analysis of your drive to tell you what is taking up a lot of space.

Thank you very much for the warm welcome and prompt response!

I knew it wasn't predominately Time Machine as these were saved on my external; however, I turned off automatic backups and back on again to make sure.

What did it was DaisyDisk as you suggested. I was reluctant to pay for anything but paid the £10 for the sake of time and it picked up >20gb of data and cache in Outlook(!) which was from a previous job that I left earlier in the year. I went into Outlook to first remove the profile and then back into DaisyDisk to remove the files.

Thanks again!

Here is what I would do.

First, I'd download:

Maintenance (free)

Titanium Software | Operating System Utilities for Mac - Maintenance

Maintenance is an operating system maintenance and cleaning utility for macOS that you can use to perform miscellaneous tasks of computer maintenance: run periodic scripts; rebuild the databases; delete application, font, and system caches; and more.

www.titanium-software.fr

I'd run Maintenance using the default settings. This will delete random log files, cache files, etc., and it may free up a surprising amount of space.

Thank you Randy, appreciate the suggestion (especially a free one!) I've downloaded Maintenance and run that also to try free up more space. Much appreciated!