increase free space in MacBook Air

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive

1. See Lion/Mountain Lion's Storage Display.

2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.

3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.

4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.

5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.

6. See The Storage Display.

You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.

You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.

Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

What is "Other" and What Can I Do About It?- Apple Support Communities

The SSD of the Air and macbook Pro Retina SSD are "working platform" computers.

Your best practical option is buying a 1TB external HD for $65 and offload BIG FILES

regardless of internal HD or SSD, need an external backup for time machine and same for important file storage.

The "low" capacity of the SSD on the Air and entry level Retina are meant to be working platforms for these computers.

*Meaning ALL your programs and your working data (stuff you use at least every week).

To try to use either the Air or Retina as a massive storage platform of any kind (lots of pics, music, movies etc.) is both not indicated or practical.

external storage, quality too, is absurdly cheap right now.

superslim external HD perfect for the Air, its even thinner than the Air itself.

see this: only 7mm thick

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canvio-Portable-External-Drive/dp/B009F1CXI2/ref=s r_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1377642728&sr=1-1&keywords=toshiba+slim+500gb

Or better still this HUGE HD, which is very small, very reliable and very cheap:

2 Terabytes, 2.5" and only $119

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canvio-Basics-Portable-HDTB120XK3CA/dp/B00ARJD56K

You must be keeping something on the drive to max it out. How large is the disk? How are you determining the amount of "free" space?

"Other" is everything that is not in one of the categories listed, including:

System files

documents

email

zip

rar & tar

dmg

mkv

swap space

sleep image

virtual machine & OS

and a ton of "other" stuff

For those really interested in knowing what and where data is being stored on their drive:

WhatSize - my personal recommendation

DaisyDisk

DiskInventoryX - the free alternative

Time Machine Local Snapshots Laptops

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

then your Air is backing up to itself

open time machine menu bar upper right. turn it off.

when you refrain from backing up your Air for a while AND time machine is on, it backs itself up to itself (seems absurd to some, but logical)

problem solved

Turn off Time Machine. Remove snapshots.

Time Machine Snapshots

Open the Terminal in the Utilities folder and enter or paste the appropriate command line. Press RETURN and enter your admin password when prompted. It will not be echoed. Press RETURN again.

To turn them ON: sudo tmutil enablelocal

To turn them OFF: sudo tmutil disablelocal

Note that turning them OFF will also delete all existing snapshots.

For more about snapshots see: OS X Mountain Lion- About local snapshots.