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

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.

IF you "gave up" and didn't erase the SSD and start over then you probably don't have a stable system. The best course would be to either place the original drive in and enclosure and clone its contents to the SSD or put it back into the computer, erase the TimeMachine backup since you cannot trust it, and the. Start over with the SSD after erasing it

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

Deleting folders from MobileSync helped so much! Got 23G back. Thank you!

I had exactly the same problem, my Macbook Air is an early model with 2GB RAM and 60 (64?) GB storage, have had it for around 6 years and in the last year I have constantly been getting the warning that the disk is full. I checked the storage and it was almost entirely full of "other." So I deleted almost every single document, movie, picture etc I could find, and constantly cleared the browsing history etc, and there was a very slight improvement, it freed up about 2GB maximum. Finally I downloaded Omni Disk Sweeper and found the real culprit.... Mail! It was using up 33GB of my storage (i.e. about half of it.) I use my Macbook for business and have countless emails sitting on it with massive attachments, going back years, which I never delete in case I need to refer to them in the future. I have atarted the long process of sifting through and deleting all except those which I am really likely to need; in 30 minutes I have freed up an additional 1GB and I reckon if I keep eating away at them for half an hour each day to clear the backlog I will eventually clear half of my storage. All I need now is to replace the battery if that is possible (mine now only lasts about 5 minutes) and my Macbook Air will be reborn!

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.

When you refer to a "Library folder" does this include the library at iPhotos, or a photo in the library, are there 'library folders' elsewhere on the MacBook Air, for example? What exactly are you referring to by 'library folder' and 'application support folder'; I'd like to be able to understand

the advice you are offering. Thank you for you time and consideration.

Hey dwb,

Thanks for the comments and the tips, but unfortunately this wasn't very helpful to me. Recently, I changed my HDD to an SDD, and when i was putting my old files to the new disk by migration assistant with my time machine backup, something went wrong (I think that was because I had some corrupted file in the HDD) and i had to give up and restart the computer. I ended up taking just some files in the external HD in the finder (that was about 15 GB). The problem is that when I open the storage tab (in about this mac), it says that I have only 22.62 GB free of 238.83, so I'm using 216.21 GB, and of those, 144.91 is tagged as 'Others'. I tried using OmniDiskSweeper, but even this app says that I'm using only 88.6 GB. So I have about 127.61 GB unused that went nowhere.

If you can help me in any way, I would be very thankful, because no one seems to know the answer to this problem.

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

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

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 appreciate the idea and cleaned up a few backups but didn't seem to reduce much of the "Other" storage.

I took the advise and found 75G tied...thx

you have a corrupted partition

Thank you so much! You helped me clear 38GB from the 'other' storage.