How To Delete "Other" Storage From Mac?

As someone who has sung the virtues of Apple for over 20 years I can't believe it has come to this. You should not have to spend a day or two or more regaining storage you never actually used. I have zero songs and 1 photo on my macbook on purpose so that I can manage a modest number of short films and slide shows in keynote exclusively on my Macbook. And low and behold I am out of space even thought I use my Macbook like a highly specialized vehicle for specific presentations. I don't want to hear some troll tell me the answer is burried in some thread I must spend a few days unravelling, I want Apple to get their head out their ***** and support their products.

I found that my '/private/var/log/apache2/error_log' was up to over 300G (yes Gigabytes).

I did 'sudo sh -c "cat /dev/null > error_log"' and it set it back to zero.

I got back my 300G of empty space.

Thanks. I did this but only freed up 7GB. Still have 107GB almost 50% of memory used up by "other". Any other suggestions?

Use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space.

Proceed further only if the problem hasn't been solved.

ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To really see everything, you have to run it as root.

First, back up all data if you haven't already done so. No matter what happens, you should be able to restore your system to the state it was in at the time of that backup.

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ If you’re running Mac OS X 10.7 or later, open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the page that opens.

After installing ODS in the Applications folder, drag or copy — do not type — the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up.

I don't recommend that you make a habit of this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. When you're done with it, quit it and also quit Terminal.

I had this same problem with my MacBook Air and recognized in iTunes that I had over 7 back ups of iPhones and iPads. Once I deleted them it cleared from 30GB to 14GB of "Other" storage space on my hard drive.

To delete them...Open iTunes > then Preferences > once there go to the Devices tab and there you should see the backups there. Select the iPad and/or iPad backups you don't want and delete them.

Hope that helps.

I also found another way to delete "other". If you currently use the Messages app. All of your texts as well as attachments files are saved to your computer. For example: I use the Messages app on my computer and I have a group chat with all of my friends and we share countless attachments every day. I deleted the message in the Messages app and that DID NOT free up any space and then I realized that even when you delete a message from the Messages app on your mac it does not delete the Archive of that message. If you click the magnifying glass in the top right corner and type in the contacts name, the archived message will show up in your finder. Navigate to that folder and you will see all of your archived messages. DELETE all of these and then empty from trash and you will see a lot of space free up in "other". I deleted all archived messages and it freed up over 50gigs. Doing this along with deleting your iPhone backups and ensuring you only have one - the most recent - will surely free up space in "other". Hope this helps and hope my explanation was good enough to follow.

Great ! now the "other" is with one iphone backup and my "other" is "only" 61GB....

what is the 120GB of "backup" I have on the 500DB SSD ?

Could it be Time Machine ? ( I am backing up to a WD external drive....)

Can I see what is the "backup" is combined of which adds up to 120GB?

Thanks,

Hanani

FINALLY! I have been looking everywhere and your post finally answered my question. I just checked my backups on iTunes and I had like 30 from all of my iPhones over the past years. I finally deleted all of them except my current one and it freed up 80gigs! Thanks for your post!

thank you thank you thank you! i have been frustrated over this for months now with that annoying 'your disk is almost full' message coming up daily and now i have found an extra 24GB. you sir/mamm are amazeballs and i want to hug you so much right now

I also found another way to delete "other". If you currently use the Messages app. All of your texts as well as attachments files are saved to your computer. For example: I use the Messages app on my computer and I have a group chat with all of my friends and we share countless attachments every day. I deleted the message in the Messages app and that DID NOT free up any space and then I realized that even when you delete a message from the Messages app on your mac it does not delete the Archive of that message. If you click the magnifying glass in the top right corner and type in the contacts name, the archived message will show up in your finder. Navigate to that folder and you will see all of your archived messages. DELETE all of these and then empty from trash and you will see a lot of space free up in "other". I deleted all archived messages and it freed up over 50gigs. Doing this along with deleting your iPhone backups and ensuring you only have one - the most recent - will surely free up space in "other". Hope this helps and hope my explanation was good enough to follow.

arowbie wrote:

Thanks. I did this but only freed up 7GB. Still have 107GB almost 50% of memory used up by "other". Any other suggestions?

If you understand what OTHER consists of, you would not want to delete all of it:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-5142

Ciao.

Thank You SOOOO much!!!! Ive been getting notifications for the past couple months warning me that my storage is almost full of full and i have tried so many ways to try to clean out all that crap that has been filling up my storage and i tried your way and it removed SO much!! i went from 100% full to like 60%!!! I am SO happy now!!!!!

Hi

it looks like i found a way to get ride from deleted files that you have physically deleted from your mac, but they have't been really deleted. (pardon me for my English)

1st, you got to have (OmniDiskSweeper), and (Clean my mac).

2nd, Open OmniDiskSweeper and choose your drive, which is probably ( Macintosh HD).

3rd, Choose .cleverfiles.>hlink.db. you will see so many files that you deleted in the past but they are still in your mac.

Now in the page of OmniDiskSweeper at the very bottom at the left corner, you'll see a white file picture, press it and a window will pop out, select all the files by clicking ( Command+A) now right click on the touchpad, from the menu choose (Erase Using Clean my mac).

Now Clean my mac will pop out and you'll see al the file you selected to delete. you'll see a circle at the bottom of Clean my mac that says ( Shred) press it.

now you will have gotten rid of some of the others lol.

See:

http://pondini.org/OSX/LionStorage.html

Tried everything presented in the forum that I saw, but nothing worked. I figured out that you have to click on the trash bin and press empty in the top right. saved 120gb!