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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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!!!

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

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.

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

you have a corrupted partition

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