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hard drive full by "other"

I have the mac mini with a 500gb hard drive. I'm a photographer so that is my main use of the computer. I've got 266gb of photos, 13.1gb of audio, 9.9gb of movies, 7.97gb of apps, and out of nowhere, 188.92gb of other. I know where everything has come from, but I have no idea about what the other is and how all of sudden my hard drive is so full by it. In programs the only things I've downloaded is Photoshop elements, yahoo chat, and spotify. I haven't really used itunes as none of my music is on the computer and I sync my iphone through another computer for the music. I have phot stream turned on between my iphone and my iphoto. I've checked the cache and couldn't find any files large enough for that. I cleared out my internet history and cookies just in case and it barely opened up space. If anyone has any idea of what could cause nearly 200gb worth of space to be taken up out of nowhere, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Mar 9, 2012 8:27 PM

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19 replies

Nov 1, 2015 6:55 PM in response to fromghosts

I had 220 GB of "other" on a 250 GB drive. Spent 3 hours with Apple support yesterday - they couldn't find it. Ran across your post this evening and took your advice and installed OmniDiskSweeper. Turned out I had multiple extra volumes created by Acronis True Image. I was using it to back up my MacBook Air to an external drive on a PC. I noticed Acronis stopped working a while ago but never got around to figuring out why. Apparently, it was creating the backups as separate volumes on my Macbook Air and not deleting them when it couldn't move them to the PC. Deleted 5 extra volumes, deleted Acronis, and ordered a portable external HD to use for Time Machine. Problem solved!

hard drive full by "other"

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