As above my greyed out storage area on my macbook air is showing 94 GB of other!
I have reduced as much clutter as I can from files and Applications. Now need help to get into this grey other storage!
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15
You can get a better handle on this with a utility like OmniDiskSweeper, WhatSize, or Daisy Disk. At least some of these are free or offer a free trial version. They will go through your entire computer and let you sort folders and files by size. You will be able to see specifically what is taking up space.
It is safest to NOT try to delete things in any of the system areas or anything inside /private subfolders. As was pointed out to you earlier, that could damage your computer. However there are some areas that sometimes store large files that you may no longer need:
Downloads -- see if you delete what is in there (won't affect your computer)
Your user Library folder, Application Support, Mobilesync folder. This folder stores iPhone backups. There might be old ones for phones no longer in use, those could be deleted (keep the current ones).
Your user Library folder, iTunes folder, look for large folders that contain UPDATES downloaded for your iPhone, iPad etc. Those update downloads can be deleted as they can be re-downloaded again if need be.
Use a free program like EasyFind or Find Any File to search across your entire computer for all files that contain the string .dmg in their name -- these are installer files that you might no longer need, if so they can be deleted.
How large is your Macbook Air internal drive? If it is not large enough for everything (you should always keep about 20 GB or 20% [which ever is larger] free at all times), you could move large photo libraries or video files to an external drive to save space. If you do this, I suggest using an external SSD, it is much faster than an external HDD, and you should make plans to keep everything backed up, regardless where it physically is stored.
Other options to free up space include using iCloud for photos and storage -- make sure you understand the advantages and limitations of doing this before you try it. Also, Apple Music may enable you to save space as it basically provides you music through cloud storage versus on your Mac. Some of these options do come with a charge.
See this Apple article for more suggestions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206996
Finally, you could elect to replace your internal drive with a larger one (SSD). This would cost several hundred dollars, most likely, however. But 1 TB or 2 TB internal SSDs are common nowadays.
You can get a better handle on this with a utility like OmniDiskSweeper, WhatSize, or Daisy Disk. At least some of these are free or offer a free trial version. They will go through your entire computer and let you sort folders and files by size. You will be able to see specifically what is taking up space.
It is safest to NOT try to delete things in any of the system areas or anything inside /private subfolders. As was pointed out to you earlier, that could damage your computer. However there are some areas that sometimes store large files that you may no longer need:
Downloads -- see if you delete what is in there (won't affect your computer)
Your user Library folder, Application Support, Mobilesync folder. This folder stores iPhone backups. There might be old ones for phones no longer in use, those could be deleted (keep the current ones).
Your user Library folder, iTunes folder, look for large folders that contain UPDATES downloaded for your iPhone, iPad etc. Those update downloads can be deleted as they can be re-downloaded again if need be.
Use a free program like EasyFind or Find Any File to search across your entire computer for all files that contain the string .dmg in their name -- these are installer files that you might no longer need, if so they can be deleted.
How large is your Macbook Air internal drive? If it is not large enough for everything (you should always keep about 20 GB or 20% [which ever is larger] free at all times), you could move large photo libraries or video files to an external drive to save space. If you do this, I suggest using an external SSD, it is much faster than an external HDD, and you should make plans to keep everything backed up, regardless where it physically is stored.
Other options to free up space include using iCloud for photos and storage -- make sure you understand the advantages and limitations of doing this before you try it. Also, Apple Music may enable you to save space as it basically provides you music through cloud storage versus on your Mac. Some of these options do come with a charge.
See this Apple article for more suggestions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206996
Finally, you could elect to replace your internal drive with a larger one (SSD). This would cost several hundred dollars, most likely, however. But 1 TB or 2 TB internal SSDs are common nowadays.
You can not. It is part of Apple's storage of miscellaneous files. You should ask yourself why would you want to start deleting something that you have no idea what it does? If you could delete these files, you would likely wind up with a computer that is non functional.
Greyed out other storage taking up 96gb!
