Can't seem to clear up space.

[Ross Monster]

Hi! First time user and post here and I'm so baffled by my current problem, I really hope someone can help me! ;P

I'm using a 500Gb Mac Mini as an editing machine for a company and the computer every now and then tells me that my hard disk is reaching capacity, so I clean a few things out here and there and usually it's good to go.

Today I was editing and when I went to my storage bar to look and see how everything was doing, the yellow (infamous) "other" bar was through the roof. I did about an hour of research, learned about how cache works and downloaded "CleanMyMac2" by MacPaw and let it do it's thing. The results came back that there was only 1.42GB of "cleanable" cache.

When I search around the physical main HD, there isn't really much on it. Besides the couple of movie clips I have laying around, three days ago I moved almost 182GB of things off of it and onto an external Seagate HD, and I am making sure to restart the system after every "dump" of the trash so the computer has a chance to refresh itself. . The problem is, the bar still currently shows: http://oi59.tinypic.com/35a83s3.jpg

I don't know what else to do? Please help! I would so greatly appreciate it!

 

[pigoo3]

Please give this a read:

OS X: What is "other" space in About This Mac? - Apple Support

- Nick

 

[Ross Monster]

Please give this a read:

OS X: What is "other" space in About This Mac? - Apple Support

- Nick

This was the very first article I read into. We don't have "contacts" on these computers, and the "Messenger" app is not set up. Also, we don't have Documents since this computer is only used to edit video. When I comb through what's on this hard drive, I just don't see why or how anything could be taking up such a large amount of space.

 

[pigoo3]

This was the very first article I read into.

You should have mentioned this in the first post. I hate wasting folks time suggesting things that have already been done!

We don't have "contacts" on these computers, and the "Messenger" app is not set up. Also, we don't have Documents since this computer is only used to edit video. When I comb through what's on this hard drive, I just don't see why or how anything could be taking up such a large amount of space.

Try downloading and installing the app "Disk Inventory X:

Disk Inventory X

It may help figuring things out.

- Nick

p.s. By the way…I don't think installing and running "CleanMyMac 2" was a very good idea. It's one of the "crap apps" we recommend NOT installing. It can cause unexpected issues.

 

[MacInWin]

Get Onyx, it's free and will clean out caches and logs for you that get cluttered up over time. Run Disk Utility and Repair Permissions and Verify the drive to see if there are any file structure issues.

 

[Ross Monster]

Thank you both! I'm going to try both of those suggestions and see where I get.