What is the "other" on my storage?

Open Time Machine preferences and see if you have Local Snapshots enabled. If you do then disable it. If local snapshots have been saved this will delete them as well as disable them.

OS X Lion- About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs

Kappy,

I'm not seeing any options within Time Machine Preferences regarding the enabling or disabling of "Local Snapshots". Does yours have this feature? Also, I'm not seeing any mention of the option within the document you reference. It seems that it is enabled automatically within Lion, with no option for disabling.

Edit: Nevermind. I see that if you turn off Time Machine altogether, local snapshots are diabled. But it's a pretty "cludgy" option, if you simply want Time Machine to work sans local snapshots.

I think Kappy is refering to the developer preview of Lion, The retail version has the option to turn it off removed. the only way is through terminal command: sudo tmutil disablelocal

See comments in this thread:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1104436

To turn them ON: sudo tmutil enablelocal

To turn them OFF: sudo tmutil disablelocal

Note that turning them OFF will also delete all existing snapshots.

I don't see it on mine because I am not using a notebook.

Open Disk Utility and see what is reported for used and available space. That "other" category is just what cannot be filed under the existing categories and is most likely just free space. What matters is what DU reports.

Hey guys,

My MacBook Pro is reporting an outstanding 123GB of "other" storage out of a total 250GB. I checked in Disk Utility and it is reporting the same thing. Any idea what else I could do?

Hi All,

Mine is exactly the same, with ' Other' taking up 236.41GB. I am getting "not enough momory" messages.

See I have this same problem but it is worse.

I have a mac book air but other takes as much as 59 GB when i only have 60! UGG!😢

oh and time machine isnt on with mine sooooo......

did anyone find a solution to this? i have the same problem. a huge and unexplained 'other' caption within storage.

I deleted Wigets i downloaded, emptied my trash and deleted all my browser's cookies and history etc and it helped alot.

Dont know what else yet. Im new to mac and not too computer savy just know the basic stuff not too much of whats under the hood and how it operates. I have a Macbook pro. My other was at 74gb when it was just 30something less than a week ago. I started researching here and i found some info and started deleting those stuff. When i have more time i have to do more investigating as to what else i can delete and how. I know there must be some memory used in other because of the user settings, preferences and mail and all the other stuff. Just dont want it too big. If i can get mine down to at least10gb then ill feel good. Here is the link that helped me. It may help you too. http://pondini.org/OSX/LionStorage.html

Hi,

Can anyone help me with this: (see attached picture)

I suppose there is a (preference) file to reset in order to display correctly the storage information ?

Thank you for your help.

Stan.