How to reduce enormous "Other" storage on macOS 10.15.6 Catalina?

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How to reduce enormous "Other" storage on macOS 10.15.6 Catalina?

My Mac shows 78.89 GB in storage as "Other". By comparison, my documents are taking only 53GB. How do I reduce and reclaim space used by "Other"?

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Sep 24, 2020 7:13 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,072 points

Sep 24, 2020 9:53 AM in response to Nikki.Reynolds

My Mac shows 78.89 GB in storage as "Other". By comparison, my documents are taking only 53GB. How do I reduce and reclaim space used by "Other"?

Is there another user account on the Mac that is using That storage?

Otherwise, you just need to find all of the files that spotlight could not identify. Spotlight categorizes all of the files into those categories. If it doesn’t know what kind of file it is, either truthfully or by mistake, then it shows up as other.

It also could be local time machine snapshots or other various system files or run away logs.

You need to use a tool that actually works for finding where files are stored. I like GrandPerspective, but OmniDiscSweeper works well, too. GrandPerspective is available on the App Store for a fee, but there is a free version on SourceForge.net. OmniDiscSweeper is free from The Omni Group.

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Answer 2

Sep 28, 2020 4:01 PM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks, Barney-15E,

I gave OmniDiscSweeper a try, and deleted some redundant stuff in my user account. Then I used PowerPhotos to remove duplicates from my Photos library. I managed to gain a lot of free space, but none, or only a minuscule amount, came from the "Other" file type. Now my User files are down so low that the "Other" file type is very, very nearly as big as all other file types combined. The other user accounts on the machine were created as a courtesy to my husband, who in fact has his own laptop and has never even logged into this computer.

I note also that the "iOS" files have their own (quite slender) category among the "known" file types, and so are not part of this "Other". I really think there is something wrong with an OS that would have that many basically unknown file types taking up space on a drive. The system files are much smaller by comparison: system files = 11.33GB, "other" files = 73.18GB.

I could use some more ideas on discovering what this "other" is and how to prune it. Preferably something short of backing everything up and reformatting the drive to start over from the beginning.

Sigh,

Nikki

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How to reduce enormous "Other" storage on macOS 10.15.6 Catalina?

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