what is storage "other" and how big should it be?

What you are seeing in the Storage section is exactly what most other Aperture 3 users with a large library of RAW photos see. Compare the reported size of "other" to the size of your Aperture library. That is the easiest way to confirm the two are related if you aren't sure. You can also Get Info(to find the size) on all of the major folders. If you start with Macintosh HD and work your way down, it doesn't take too many to figure out where 400GB is being taken up.

Stating with confidence that this is most likely your Aperture library I still highly recommend looking at the link Pondini posted. Especially if you've been trying to figure this out for months, you want to be sure.

Autumn

I have Aperture as well but do not shoot in "RAW", JPEG only. Approximately 350 photos at this time. I have the same problem with my imac in that it shows HD nearly full and 80% is "other". Don't think its RAW that is doing it on yours but could be wrong. I don't know what is doing it and would ceratainly like to find out. Have gone through every part of this thing and deleted a bunch of unnecessary docs, emptied caches and many photos but cant seem to significantly reduce "other". I recently updated to OSX Lion but do not know what space on HD was prior to upgrade so can't say if upgrading had anything to do with it. Definitely looking for answers....

See Where did my Disk Space go?

Rule out the things in the yellow, blue, and pink boxes.

If nothing there helps, see the Other large files section. One of the free apps listed there should help. If not, see the green box.

Just fyi for anyone still having trouble... I downloaded Omni Disk Sweeper and found that I had 350 GB's of mail..... yeah really. Something to do with "recoverd mail" in imail which repeatedly "recovered" a specific 35 MB e-mail over and over and over again... So 4 hours of deleting these e-mails later and my "other" section has been reduced almost completely.

And because I don't want this to happen again, no more imail for me thank you. Don't need it anyway.

Thanks Pondini!

iMail? What's that?

A couple of suggestions.

1 Certainly for a laptop, the Time Machine snapshots fill the hard disk with a cache. It automatically thins if space is required, but About my Mac, Disk Utility and Activity Monitor include it in the used disk space. The MacIntosh HD>Get Info does not. If you turn off Snapshots, the numbers should come back into line.

2. If you have done a secure delete or deleted free space using Disk Utility, but not given time for the cleanup process at the end, there can be large temporary files left behind. I'd run DU Erase Freespace and give it all the time it wants to finish. This will take a few hours.

putnik wrote:

. . .

If you turn off Snapshots, the numbers should come back into line.

Not if you're looking at the "Other" category.

Local Snapshots aren't in "Other;" they're in the separate "Backups" category.

Pondini, thanks for the correction.

Do you remember another third party app that was generating multple files and filling the disk, I think it was a drawing app?

Not offhand. But there are several things that can take up a great deal of space. The most common ones are listed in Where did my Disk Space go?, along with ways to figure out what else it might be.

Sorry... Mailbox or mail, whatever it is that comes pre-loaded on the Imac.

I appreciate this overall discussion but I don't see a clean answer. I noticed the problem when syncing an older iPod (software v.1.3) with my Macbook Pro - notice the screen shot from Lion 10.7.4 which is different from the iTunes 10.6.1 shot posted second.

System report -

iTunes report -

All of my sync on this iPod is done manual and only music (no movies, games, TV, etc...), and I've confirmed on the iTunes tree that only music files are visible.

Whlle I do sync some Aperture files on other iPods, I don't on this one...

Should I start from scratch on this iPod in order to restore the space and make more room for music?

Ravenhead wrote:

I appreciate this overall discussion but I don't see a clean answer.

No, there is no simple, single answer, because it all depends on how much of what sort of data you have on your Mac.

For an explanation, see Lion's Storage Display.

I think you miss my point - the question from a user perspective shouldn't have to be how other is defined, but why would Lion or Aperture (probably) quietly steal half of my iPod storage and not show it in the directory tree? The link you provided doesn't really acknowledge the unique nature of the iPod and how storage is managed via iTunes (certainly by most customers like me).

When I recently cleaned up my Mac Pro hard drive and primary Aperture library, I learned more about why Aperture takes up so much room via thumbnails and versions... I rarely synced iPod to my MacBook Aperture library but could all this storage be Aperture thumbnails or versions that do not appear on the directory? How would I even know that and be able to remove them?

I'd be the first to agree that Apple's documentation, in general, is skimpy at best.

At the end of the Lion's Storage Display is this sentence:

"If there's still more on your system than you expect, see Where did my Disk Space go?"

That link shows the common causes of unexpected disk space usage, and how to deal with them, and ways to find others.