what is classed as 'other' on lion about this mac storage?

On my side I spotted the following in other

- iLife asset management in the libraries: dunno exactly what this is (meta files -> 'other' ?)

- Mail downloaded an offline version of my Gmail account for offline review: kaboom. I find it useful to have all my mails achived in the cloud (so not to delete anything), so I unchecked this option and gained a few GB.

I presently have 383 GB of 'other' files on my 750GB HD.

I am doing a sweep right now Omnidisk

THANK YOU THANK YOU SOOOOOO MUCH. OMNIDISK RULES!!!! Thank you soo much man! 🙂

I am having the same problem. How do you know which files to delete? What do the colors of the folder sizes indicate?

Post a screenshot first of ->About This Mac->[More Info...]->Storage:

i.e.:

My "other" storage just recently increased exponentially. Before it was 35GB approx, which made mathematical sense considering the apps and programs I have installed.

Don't delete anything yet, but post a screenshot of what you see with OmniDiskSweeper

Nothing too out of the ordinary, right?

The only thing I see that you should look into is the 3.5G in lost+found (but that does not explain your usage in Other). Also, Omni is showing a disk of 150G, but that must be wrong as Apple shows it at 250G.

Is this a laptop? Do you use Time Machine? This should'nt help (won't hurt), but try turning Time Machine OFF in System Preferences, wait a few minutes, then turn it back ON

Note the last 5 items in the first column, that show zero bytes.

Those are things you're not authorized to read, so will always show zero bytes via OmniDiskSweeper and most similar free apps.

Two that can get large are:

.MobileBackups (Local snaphots), but according to the Storage display, you only have a few MBs of them.

.DocumentRevisions-V101 (the Versions database, containing previous versions of files you've changed with apps that support it (TextEdit, Preview, Numbers and Pages, plus some 3rd-party apps). It doesn't save complete copies, but only the changed "chunks."

You've also got 5.9 GB in private (a hidden system folder). That's fairly large, and is probably some very big log files. See the grreen box in OSX Log Files.

For more info, see Lion's Storage Display and/or Where did my Disk Space go?

Hi, I have read this thread because I have the error message disk full, and in this Mac in storage I have 497GB being used by other. Downloaded the omnidiskSweeper and no big files are showing up. Do you have any other ideas? I have an external drive that have iMovie files full, but not hooked up. Have icloud, and an iPad..

Very new PowerBook.

I see now, it is my mail...going there now to see if I can clear up! Thanks for the lead:)

trishaclarkin wrote:

Hi, I have read this thread because I have the error message disk full, and in this Mac in storage I have 497GB being used by other. Downloaded the omnidiskSweeper and no big files are showing up. Do you have any other ideas?

See Where did my Disk Space go?

I took my computer to the apple store and they ran a test that restore that free space and it didn't take too long either. Still not sure why it happened. Take your device into the store if possible.
Good luck!

I downloaded omni disk sweeper to loacate the 'other' files taking up space on my hard drive and it has found my .sparsebundle files (197GB)

Can anyone advise me if it is ok to delete my .sparsebundle files? i have 197GB of 8.0MB Bands files.

Cheers, Leigh