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

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.

I've been having issues too and googling all day. I had about 181 GB of "other" in my storage and couldn't figure out what it was until now. I went into the "Library" folder and went to "mobilesync" under the "Application Support" folder and deleted all the stuff in there and deleted from the trash which looked like there was gazillion items in that Mobilesync folder. Once that was done, I went back to check the storage and it went down to 50GB! I can live with that for now.

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.

I cleaned all the back ups found in ~/library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup and liberated 40+ Gbs of storage.....A dream come true ;-)

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.

I went this route for my MacBook Pro Retina 13 early 2015, which I bought about 6 months ago ...

Finder > Go > Library > Application Support > Mbilesync and deleted the three folders in there. Then emptied the trash.

Checked my storage and it went from 13 % free to 84% free !!! WOW!!! Spectacular!!!

THANK YOU!!!

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.

emptying my iPhoto Trash was the eye opener... there goes the 6500 photos I thought I already deleted. Thanks!

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.

There are two Library folders. If you open a Finder Window you’ll see the Applications, System, Library, and Users folder. This Library is the system Library and unless you know what you are doing you shouldn’t delete anything from it unless directed to by someone you know is an experienced user or an AppleCare representative. If you mouse up to the Finder’s Go menu and hold the option key you’ll see a Library item. Deleting things from this folder can make your computer unusable.

Select that and you’ll open a window to your account Library. This Library contains configurations for your account. If you don’t know what you are doing you can mess up your account but not the computer. In other words you might make MS Word unusable when you log in but if your significant other who shares your computer logs in Word works just fine. This is why we veterans often suggest that a user having problems create a new account and log into it. If the problem doesn’t appear in the new account we know it isn’t the entire computer, just that user account.

Traditionally (but this is changing with MacOS 10.10) the user’s Library has had a folder called Application Support. This folder is where program developers have stored resources such as clip art, templates, etc.

That works for me for now. I think all the backups from your previous iPhones (2G till now 6+) and iPads backup are stored here, making a huge volume of storage. I deleted them, only leaving the latest backup from mobile sync and now Other reduced to 82GB for a 256SSD MBA. I can live with that for the time being.

You should also consider deleting those unused folder in the Application Support.

I Had this problem with only 3gb left of space (terrible I know)

the first thing I did was go into iTunes, preferences (shortcut cmd then comma) and delete all backups except my most recent. This cleared at least 10 gb.

after that I went into help, searched library, clicked it then deleted Things such as Skype and useless apps, cleared out around 70gb I was so happy.

Read this:

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

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