"Other Users" occupies 230GB of storage

DeepThought_42 wrote:

Although the “Users” folder on my Macintosh HD totals to around 120GB, my Mac storage is full with almost half its capacity occupied by some mysterious “Other Users” category. I’d be very grateful for suggestions as to what might be the cause of this, and how I could go about deleting these files. Thank you!

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

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206996

User tip: "Other and What Can I Do About It ?"

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-5142

reference:

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/04/09/where-did-all-that-free-space-go-on-my-apfs-disk/

Try something like OmniDiskSweeper for a GUI to get a good look at itemized file size and location:

OmniDiskSweeper http://www.omnigroup.com/more

DeepThought_42 wrote:

Thank you, leroydouglas, for your help. OmniDiskSweeper will definitely help to free some space.

However, OmniDiskSweeper detects only about 190GB used space on my Mac HD. This amount (according to the summary in “About This Mac”) is about the amount of used space of everything excluding the “Other Users” category. Do you think it possible that OmniDiskSweeper is detecting everything apart from the “Other Users” data?

Thanks again!

OmniDiskSweeper is not being selective— it is a GUI simply showing files by size on your HD. "OTHER" is catch-all category as more than fully described in the User tip above: "Other and What Can I Do About It ?" file referenced above

If you do not trust the OmniDisk Sweeper there are other GUI or from Terminal.app you can see it all as well

File size, and finding missing GB— list the items in the home folder with the sizes, including invisible items, copy and paste:

sudo du -h -d 1 ~/

File size, and finding missing GB —will list the items in root with the sizes, including invisible items, copy and paste:

sudo du -h -d 1 /

Terminal User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

DeepThought_42 wrote:

my Mac storage is full with almost half its capacity occupied by some mysterious “Other Users” category.

This usually means you have another user account on the laptop. Log into the other user account(s) to access those files.

The other day I ran OmniDiskSweeper on a laptop running an older version of macOS and it did not show the data for the other User accounts. You can see how much storage each of those user folders are taking up by modifying the command provided by @leroydouglas:

sudo  -hd 1  /Users