I have 157 GB of movies on my Mac, and I have no idea where they are located. I have tried all of the obvious places. I am running Yosemite, 10.10.5. Any ideas? Thanks!
MacBook Pro 13″, OS X 10.10
About This Mac > Storage is fiction. Do not use it because the information is not reliable. The "Other" category is just that. A made up category that does not really exist on your computer. See What is 'Other' and 'Purgeable' in About This Mac? If you have only 351MBs of free space on your SSD, then remove as many files as you can to an external drive. You do not have enough space on such a small SSD to store anything more than what is essential. The rest of your data should be kept on external devices. A startup drive should maintain a minimum of 20GBs as free space. OS X will take up as much as 50GBs which leaves about 50GBs or so for your data storage needs.
Given the info you just provided, I would predict that continued usage of the drive, without shedding a lot of your data, will eventually corrupt the drive's directory and boot block. This will render the drive unusable. You would be forced to erase the drive and lose all your files. The following can help you avoid such a disaster.
Get Correct Storage Information
Do not use the information from the Storage section of the About This Mac dialog. Ignore the Storage information as it is typically wrong. To find out the correct information for any disk: Select a Desktop disk icon. Press Command-I to open the Get Info window and look at the topmost panel displayed. You will find the disk information displayed for Capacity, Available, and Used. If you have more than one disk/partition then repeat for each one on your Desktop.
The categories found in the Storage section of About This Mac is simply an arbitrary way of displaying files on your drive. There are no such categories actually on the drive.
How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive
About This Mac > Storage is fiction. Do not use it because the information is not reliable. The "Other" category is just that. A made up category that does not really exist on your computer. See What is 'Other' and 'Purgeable' in About This Mac? If you have only 351MBs of free space on your SSD, then remove as many files as you can to an external drive. You do not have enough space on such a small SSD to store anything more than what is essential. The rest of your data should be kept on external devices. A startup drive should maintain a minimum of 20GBs as free space. OS X will take up as much as 50GBs which leaves about 50GBs or so for your data storage needs.
Given the info you just provided, I would predict that continued usage of the drive, without shedding a lot of your data, will eventually corrupt the drive's directory and boot block. This will render the drive unusable. You would be forced to erase the drive and lose all your files. The following can help you avoid such a disaster.
Get Correct Storage Information
Do not use the information from the Storage section of the About This Mac dialog. Ignore the Storage information as it is typically wrong. To find out the correct information for any disk: Select a Desktop disk icon. Press Command-I to open the Get Info window and look at the topmost panel displayed. You will find the disk information displayed for Capacity, Available, and Used. If you have more than one disk/partition then repeat for each one on your Desktop.
The categories found in the Storage section of About This Mac is simply an arbitrary way of displaying files on your drive. There are no such categories actually on the drive.
How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive
Assuming these are your files, then they should be wherever you saved them. The usual place is /Home/Movies/ folder. If you stored them in Photos, then you will find them using the application. They would be stored in the Photos library file. Have you tried searching for them using Spotlight?
Hi, thanks for the reply. The spotlight revealed that I had some Quicktime movies lurking in various places. So thank you, that helped me to get rid of those files. The problem I was having however, still exists. My startup disk is almost full and is causing my computer to act wonky. My 121 GB storage says I have only 351 MB free, and shows 95 GB of "Other". I would like to clean out the "other" but have done all of the obvious cleanings and don't want to mistakenly delete something I need. I appreciate your reply Kappy, it was helpful, thank you!
Thank you again Kappy, your advice was very helpful to me. I got out my old external hard drive, which didn't have enough space to work with Time Machine, but I did manage to transfer larger files and applications to the external drive and delete other files so I now have 18.87 GB available on my hard drive. It was long overdue, this type of maintenance, but now I am getting greater efficiency and am not so worried about a full blown crash. I will be more cautious in the future. Thanks!
Ideally, you need at least 20GBs of free space at all times. The OS may use disk space temporarily, then return it to the free pool. However, should free space be allowed to shrink, then it is possible to incur a catastrophic data loss. So, move as much data as. you can to an external drive. I have two folders in my Home folder that, together, amount, to over 130GBs. I don't need these files on my SSD, so I store them on an external drive. I then create aliases to the external folders on my SSD. This frees up the 130GBs for data I need to keep on the SSD.
I have 157 GB of movies on my Mac, and I have no idea where they are located. I have tried all of the obvious places. I am running Yosemite, 10.10.5. Any ideas? Thanks!
