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Has anyone ever come across this before? System is saying I'm pretty much out of disk space, but more than half is being taken up under "other storage" (82GB out of 128GB).
I've looked through every folder I can find - various Library folders, Caches, etc., but can't account for what's taking up this space.
Any ideas?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15
A lot of these answers are like asking for directions to get somewhere and everyone answering with a description of how maps are made.
I just hit this issue this morning. 1TB dive, about 400GB of data and suddenly another 500GB of 'other' space gumming up the works. Where did it come from? What is it? Who knows? I don't know and Apple won't let you know either.
Random pdfs and cache files! Just random stuff the system doesn't know how to label! They helpfully tell you. Right 500GBs of them. Come on. Empty the trash they say! Sheesh- seriously? And always someone suggest omnisweep. Well I downloaded that for kicks and it told me there is around 400GB on data on my drive. It can't even see the 'other' files and doesn't tell you much more than the About file already gives you.
So what is it? Well, best I can tell it's something completely separate. Not your files, photos, trash or pdfs. Nothing like that.
In my case is was something to do with Carbon Copy Cloner. I deleted all but the most recent snapshots one by one (and I did not have that many). Nothing changed for the first few but when I deleted one of the very first ones I did- just about all the space came back. Now keep in mind that CCC made the original full backup copy on my NAS (which is still there), and only saves the snapshots of changes on the OSX hard drive. So no way that one snapshot was 500GBs. But for some reason it used up all that 'other' space.
So from that I say look to time machine backups if you have them. Or any cloning backup systems. If you are connected to a NAS check those settings. Anything over a network could be the culprit. But you will not be able to fix this though file searching and trying to delete videos.
My 'other' is now at 119.73 GB. It's still bigger than any other category and I still have no clue what it is, but that at least is a manageable number on a 1TB drive.
But seriously why the secrecy? This would be a non-issue if the system would simply allow you to see what 'other' actually is.
It actually happens fairly often.
I think some of it has to do with snapshots used for Time Machine backups among other things.
But that's just a hunch.
There is a way but one might not like it. Created a Bootable Installer, boot from it, Wipe the Entire Drive ( Not Volumes ) and install a new from Zero on the drive.
Often a big part of this space is taken up by Time Machine local snapshots, as was already said.
What is the output of the following command in Terminal?
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
You can try these options here Skins and see if it helps. https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/26/how-to-delete-time-machine-local-snapshots-in-macos
Screenshots are images, and categorized as such. Same advice as before…
"Other Storage" Taking Up More Than 50% of Hard Drive Space
