Q: How can I clean out 'other' space on my mac. Its currently taking up 120GB of space.

Empty the trash in the Dock as well as iPhoto’s trash!

Open up your application folder & go through all your apps.  Trash all the apps you no longer want and/or use.

An easier way to do this is to open the Application folder in list view & press the Command+j keys.

In the the dialog that appears, click the "This Window Only" button & the "Calculate All Sizes" check box.

Wait a bit until your file & folder sizes have all been calculated, then click the "Size" column to sort your apps from the fattest to the most anorexic.

Get rid of all your photo files you don't want and/or need.  Same goes for those pics off the websites you downloaded (gifs, jpegs, etc.).  Or transfer/move them all to a photo/movie storage site like ImageShack and Photobucket, 2 of the most popular  FREE  storage sites.

Get rid of all your video & music files you no longer view and/or listen too.  Especially, if you already have the actual CD/DVDs or you can later redownload from a website.  Or transfer them all to a FREE video/movies and/or music storage site.

Use Spotlight to make sure you got rid of everything.  You can even trash directly from Spotlight!  Better yet, download this FREE software called Find File.  This app puts Spotlight to shame (works w/Mountain Lion).

Drag what you don't want and/or need to the trash.  Better yet, download this neat little shareware app *demo* called AppZapper.  It basically does all the work for you by not only trashing the apps but the apps preference files, caches & all its associated files.

Another software that does the above is AppDelete.  Best of all this software is free!

Burn what you want and/or need onto CDs or DVDs. Not everyone has the  luxury of purchasing an external HD and/or the system requirements for iCloud to store their "stuff.”

Dropbox is a free storage utility to check out.

You can check with your ISP to see if they offer *free* storage space.  Most if not all do now-a-days.   There are thousands if not millions of *free* storage facilities on the web also.  Use your favorite search engine to search them out as they come in different storage sizes to fit your needs & wants.

Check for duplicate fonts.

Applications>Font Book

Select “All Fonts”

If you see any “black dots” next to any fonts this mean you have duplicates and/or multiple versions of these fonts.

To clean this up, select a “black dotted” font or the Apple + *click* to select multiple dotted fonts;

Edit>Resolve>Duplicates.

What the above does is turns off the duplicates & multiple version fonts.  Not delete them.

More than likely the “extras” were installed by other programs and/or other users.

Clear out font caches

Use FontNuke.  It does all the work for you.  And, best of all it’s *FREE*.

Printer Drivers

Get rid of all the printer drivers you don’t need & use except the ones for your *current* printer(s)/scanner(s).

HD>Library>Printers Folder

If you accidently threw something out that you needed for your printer/scanner it can be easily obtained from the manufacturer’s website and/or from the CD that came w/the printer/scanner.

Garage Band

Has about 1GB of loops stored.  Get rid of some some them.  You surely don’t use, like and/or need them all.

HD>Library>Audio/Apple Loops>Apple>Apple Loops For GarageBand

Or just get rid of the Garage Band app altogether if you don’t use it.

Get rid of extra languages

Strip your computer down to your “native” tongue.

You can do this with a *FREE* utility called Monolingual.  Another app that apparently does all the work for you.  I’ve never used it.  However, a lot of users here swear by & recommend it highly.

However, there is a warning for *native English speakers*. Make sure you keep BOTH English and English (United States).

Other Resources:

HD Space Checkers:

Disk Inventory X (FREE)

WhatSize (SHAREWARE)

OmniDiskSweeper (FREE)

GrandPerspective (FREE - donation)

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Mac Performance Guide

Slimming your hard drive

Rule of thumb: You should never let your hard drive get to where you have only 10-15% of space left.

Quick fix

How To Quickly Free Up Hard Drive Space on Mac OS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO-mlLApEuk

First, empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space.

According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB of available space on the startup volume (as shown in the Finder Info window) for normal operation. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of your data. There is little or no performance advantage to having more available space than the minimum Apple recommends. Available storage space that you'll never use is wasted space.

To locate large files, you can use Spotlight. That method may not find large folders that contain a lot of small files.

You can more effectively use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space. You can also delete files with it, but don't do that unless you're sure that you know what you're deleting and that all data is safely backed up. That means you have multiple backups, not just one.

Deleting files inside an iPhoto or Aperture library will corrupt the library. Any changes to a photo library must be made from within the application that created it. The same goes for Mail files.

Proceed further only if the problem isn't solved by the above steps.

ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.

Back up all data now.

Install ODS in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.

Triple-click the line of text below to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C):
sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.

Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.

The application window will open, eventually showing all files in all folders. It may take some minutes for ODS to list all the files.

I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance.

When you're done with ODS, quit it and also quit Terminal.

Use OmniDiskSweeper as Linc says.

Shadowwolf6tails wrote:

. . .

Most said that 'other' was just program files. I cant help feeling like 120 GB is way too much for 'other'

No, Other includes all sorts of stuff besides programs.  See The Storage Display for an explanation and partial list of what's there.  Towards the bottom is a link to Where did my Disk Space go?, which shows some things that may be taking up space.

I don't know if you figured it out. But if you haven't I figured out a solution. The OmniDiskSweeper lead me to the application support folder which pointed me to my iTunes. Go to iTunes preferences and then Devices. What's taking up space is your iPhone backups. Delete some of those bad boys and the space will free up.

THANK YOU SO MUCH! my god bro, ive been reading crap loads of articles about inventory x

and this and that and it only wasted my time. Very easy and useful response. I tried and it really was

my iphone back up.

I never comment on these things, but after hourly notifications of a nearly full Scratch Disc, months of analyzing my DaisyDisk and OmniDiskSweeper reports meticulously, ruthlessly removing extraneous files–iphone backups, downloads, Library and user caches, duplicate iphoto and imovie backups, and Machintosh HD aliases in case you haven't already–and one single, terrible, meltdown at work later, I found and fixed my problem. I'm posting it here in the off-chance some other unfortunate person has had the same issue as me.

First, I found out how to use OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) like a boss, using Linc Davis' tutorial above in this same thread.

The like-a-boss-ODS report told me that I had a 140GB worth of .DocumentRevision files (basically a cache of a bunch of file versions from all the graphics-heavy programs I use on the daily: omnigraffle, sketch app, the adobe creative suite, keynote) amassed. I then used the following fancy/unspeakable terminal type-y code-y tutorial to delete said .DocumentRevisions files:

http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/20/clear-versions-history-auto-save-cache-data-in-ma c-os-x/

And hallelujah, it worked. See image of my newly purged HD (my 'Other' was previously a whopping 176+ GB):

Thx, Linc Davis, that is very helpfully, I use the ODS to scan my disc, and found one folder name:group containers,  it have one file have 100GB, Can I delete it?

Great tip! Thank you so much! I've freed about 28 GB worth of "other" just by deleting the back-ups

I read through many of these and didn't want to add more programs to clean up stuff.  One suggestion that helped was to sort in the Finders window by size.  I realized that my Downloads file was huge!  I went through them all, saved what I wanted, and cleaned up 26 GB of space just from that.  Hope that helps!

In addition to iOS device backups, I noticed on my Mac that there are a lot of saved screenshots and in-game videos from The Sims. If you play that or any games like that, screenshots and videos may be part of the issue.

THIS IS MY CASE:

(I DID NOT USE ANY SOFTWARE)

OTHER SPACE WAS USING 94 GB

I WENT TO ITUNES AND DELETE ALL THE OLD IPHONE BACKUPS, SAME FOR IPAD BACKUPS. EMPTY THE TRASH....

APPARENTLY NOTHING HAPPENS BUT AFTER RESTART MY MAC WENT TO DISK UTILITY AND CHECK OTHER SPACE THIS WAS REDUCE TO 300 MB..

Thank you very helpful!