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Level 1

9 points

I have over 100 GB of "other" on my hard drive. Help!!!!

I know there are many posts out there about how to clean up or remove things from the hard drive, but I have done all that I am comfortable with doing. I am not very techy savy, so I haven't done any of the Terminal commands (I'm a chicken when it comes to just typing in random commands). I have done the Spotlight re-index (It lowered me from 137GB to 104GB). I have also emptied my trash and download files. I have no idea what is causing this (my MacBook Pro is 5 years old and is running OS X version 10.9.4. I have 250GB on the hard drive and 4 GB of memory and am running a 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - basic stuff here!). This is my breakdown....

I'm trying to backup my iPhotos to dropbox and it's the only file I'm syncing and it's telling me that I don't have enough space (yes, I've done the select sync and yes, I know some people say that backing up iPhoto is not a good thing, but I don't want to loose my photos if something were to happen to my laptop).

Any suggestions? THANK YOU :-)

iPhone 4S, Mac OS X (10.7.4), iPad 2 Wi-Fi, husband on iCloud

Posted on Jul 29, 2014 2:51 PM

Best reply

eakos

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Nov 30, 2017 3:35 PM

Thank you for this question and helpful instructions. I have an iMAC (late 2009). I had accumulated up to 300 GB of "other" storage on my internal drive. A few years ago, when my internal drive was reaching capacity, I hired a tech to help me figure out the "other". All he did was move my photos and music to an external drive. It bought me space and time, but did nothing to solve the “other” problem. I finally decided to try to sort it out myself, and was able to do so with this guidance. For other users out there, this is what I did:

1) Ran omni-disk. There was a huge discrepancy between the MBs search and the "other" category.

2) Rebuilt the spotlight index, which turned out not to help.
3) Re-ran omni-disk using terminal. This process helped me identify 298 GB (made up of hundreds of 458 MB “grow” files) at /system/library/cache/com.apple.coresymbolicationd.
4) Referenced othersites to see what this was and whether it was safe to delete. After researching the issue, I believe that it was caused by frequent crashes of iphoto.
5) Held my breath and destroyed the 298 GB with Omni.
6) Restarted my computer.

So far, so good. I will now look into updating iphotos in the hopes of eliminating the problem.