Storage Taken Up by "Other" Category

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Storage Taken Up by "Other" Category

I have a Mac Mini purchased in late 2014. It is operating fine but my 500 GB solid state drive is consistently filling up. I keep my folders fairly clean but of the 500 GB, nearly 200 GB is being used by the Other category when I evaluate my storage, so I am losing 40% of my storage. I have read some articles on how to clean this up, but those have only allowed me to free about 15 GB of storage. I'd like to get rid of most of the other 200 GB so I can have more flexibility and stop running into issues with backups and such. How do I view what is stuck in the Other category so I can determine what I can get rid of?

Posted on Jul 4, 2021 12:32 PM

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Answer 1

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D.I. Johnson

Level 7

24,083 points

Jul 4, 2021 12:43 PM in response to Mvinnie

Hello, Minnie.

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

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

What is Other on Mac Storage?

“Other” storage on Mac is files that don’t easily fall into the clearer category labels like “Audio" or “Photos”. The types of "Other" files would include:

• Cache files like user cache, browser cache, and system cache.

• Documents like PDF, .psd, .doc, etc.

• Disk images and archives like .zip and .dmg.

• macOS system and temporary files.

• App plugins and extensions.

•Everything else that doesn’t fit into the main macOS categories.

You can't manage the contents of this category. The contents are managed by macOS, and the category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac.

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Storage Taken Up by "Other" Category

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