How do I view and delete storage labeled Other?

880 GB of my 1 TB storage is Other. That is over 80% of the storage we pay for when we buy iMac. They charge more for more storage, and do not allow my version of iMac (2022) any upgrades for storage. I do have a few apps from Adobe, which now requires Creative Cloud. I suspect that because they make money off cloud storage, just like Apple, they are inclined to hide files in this are that is not accessible.


I have tried scouring the caches, but only freed up about 10 GB.


I have heard of Clean My Mac, and seen good reviews. Just not sure if it works on computers with Creative Cloud.


Thanks for any insight.

Posted on Sep 27, 2023 10:21 AM

Reply
1 reply

Sep 27, 2023 11:19 AM in response to SirFredGear

We cannot trust the Storage report as to where the usage really is, especially what “Other” or “system” is…


And apparently Apple has a new way of hiding files & more than a few find out the only way is to Backup, then Erase the Drive, or clone then clone back which seems to leave some huge temporary files behind!?


Carbon Copy Cloner seems to accomplish it...


http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html


But a few suggestions to look at... Have you emptied the trash lately?


You may find neuroanatomist's User Tip helpful: What is "Other" storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out? - Apple Community. 


Terminal code to clean DocumentRevisionsfolder…

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/313102/what-will-occur-if-the-documentrevisions-v100-folder-is-deleted

macos - What will occur if the .DocumentRevisions-V100 folder is deleted? - Ask Different (stackexchange.com)


System Memory OS 10.12.6 Sierra - Apple Community


4 suggestions…


Look for iOS backups…

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup


OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/


Purging local backups

Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.

Start Terminal from spotlight.

At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates. 

Hit enter.


Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.

Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.


Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.

Hit enter.

Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required


http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html


tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / # deletes all the snapshots


Thanks to BobHarris file sizes, Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal:...


sudo du -hx | sort -h 


sudo du -hx ~/| sort -h 

How do I view and delete storage labeled Other?

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