Q: How To Clean Up "Other" Storage on MacBook Air?

Read this:

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

This article doesn't actually give any insight in how to reduce the size of the "other" storage.

sikapwach wrote:

 

This article doesn't actually give any insight in how to reduce the size of the "other" storage.

Sure it does - read all the way to the end, where he directs you to

The real answer to this is to load everything you care about onto an external hard drive, then restart your computer and hold down COMMAND + R and then wipe your hard drive and reinstall your OS. Works like a charm.

So do you recommend that people clean their house by moving and then tearing down the old house

What Retired E and John G are trying to tell you is that having having 64GB of Other doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. Other is Apple’s way of saying “the stuff that isn’t music, movies, applications, backups, or apps” requires 64GB of drive space. It isn’t wasted space. It doesn’t necessarily mean there is stuff there you can delete. (Or maybe there is.)

If you need to free up some space on your hard drive download OmniDiskSweeper and find out what files are taking up space. Delete only those things you know about. If you aren’t sure what it is, don’t delete it. Come here and ask about it.

Good candidates for things to delete reside in these folders: Music, Movies, Pictures because these are files that tend to be huge. Also, if you use iPhoto launch the program, look for the trash can in the side bar and right click it. Select Empty trash. iPhoto has its own trash can and keeps the photos you delete until you’ve emptied the trash can.

If you go into library>Application Support>

Go through and right click>get info and see which application or folders are using up space.

I found on my after having 86GB in Other Data, That there was over 45GB in MobileSync, Which is your iPhone or iPad back ups.

You can move the back ups in this folder to an external HDD and delete the original files from your Mac, which will clear a huge space!

Also things calculated in other, are Items on your desktop and downloads folder.

Check through these to see if you can remove anything you no longer need.

Also, the mail folder, this can be quite large as well, if you have emails going back a few years like I do with attachments etc, this can take up a huge amount of HDD space as well.

Also go into iPhone, and empty the iPhoto Trash. I found I have about 10GB of HDD space wasted in there.

Hope this helps.

hi there, have you fixed the problem yet? i found out mine was due to my trash being to full my other storage was taking up over half the data storage.

I had the same problem on a 128GB Macbook air.   About 60GB was taken up by other.  I emptied the trash and the downloads folder.  But what really helped was Omni Disk Sweeper.  It helped me figure out where to trim a lot of files and applications. 11GB was taken up by iTunes backup with my iPhone alone.  Altogether I was able to get other down to 30GB of other.  Still a lot in my opinion.  I didn't realize when getting the Air that so much of the storage space would be taken up with baseline "noise" for the operating system and regular applications that come with the OS.

Ironically, I can't use iTunes to backup my iPhone on my Mac anymore with its fast (but minimal) flash storage.  I suppose I could use iCloud or pony up for a beefier Macbook, but for now my solution is to use a Windows desktop for iPhone backup with its 1TB old school drive.

Something called lost + found is taking up 5.3 GB. the comment is iNode10223419. Can I delete this?

Nope, don't delete the iNode files, it may crash your system. I also tried clearing storage space last year and deleted a file called iNode.... Next thing when i restarted my computer it was a blue screen. Had to clean the disk and reinstall OS. Thankfully i had a timemachine backup before i deleted the iNode file.

I think the question is whether we can actively and regularly clean up Application Support & Caches which takes up majority of the space.

Apple has hidden the library folder for a reason, if you don't know what you're doing deleting things in the library folder is a recipe for disaster. If you want to delete caches restart your computer in safe mode. The only time you should consider deleting something from the application support folder is if you delete a program and you want to delete its support folder.

After I ran OmniSweep, I have 4.1GB of private. There is 2.1GB of vm and 1.1GB of db. Can I delete that?

I think that a large part of the "other" storage use is from your system itself; the software, updates, etc. You could put all your pictures and movies on an external drive, which is a big help, and clear cookies etc. I try to keep games to a minimum (only two kind of big ones), they do tend to take a lot of storage space.