Why is "Other" grayed out in storage management.

Hello robin t,

Thanks for asking the Apple Support Communities for help with your Mac storage. I will offer some articles to help.

1. This article talks about the storage on your Mac: See used and available storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

2. These articles talks about making space on your internal hard drive:

• How to free up storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

• Optimize storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

• Find and delete files on your Mac - Apple Support

3. Another place that can take up lots of space are previous iTunes backups that you can delete. Check this help article: Locate backups of your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch - Apple Support

4. Once you made space, it's possible that the space is still being utilized by local snapshots. If you are using Time Machine, the system makes local snapshots which preserving your data until you make a backup. You can see if time Machine is enabled by going to System Preferences > Time Machine. If it is enabled, I recommend that you make a Time Machine backup. This is explained here: About Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support

"Your Time Machine backup disk might not always be available, so Time Machine also stores some of its backups on your built-in startup drive and other local drives. These backups are called local snapshots. One snapshot is saved every hour. If you're using macOS High Sierra, another snapshot is saved before installing any macOS update."

After you make your space, empty your trash, make the backup, then restart the Mac and see if you are able to reclaim your space. Thanks again and have a great rest of your day.

You could see if the size of Other goes down if you use Time Machine for a backup. In this case, it would probably be local backups and working files related to backups. The fact that it's grayed out means that you aren't supposed to have control of those files and changing them could cause major damage to your system.

There are a lot things that could be there, such as swap files and indices for Spotlight. My system lists 10.77 GB for System and 85.58 GB for Other. There could also be some caches there for improving performance. My guess is that System is the read-only partition used in Catalina. (The Disk Utility app seems to support this.) The Other would then be all files used by the operating system that aren't read only.