99gb of 'other' storage. Only had my macbook 6 weeks, please help?!

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99gb of 'other' storage. Only had my macbook 6 weeks, please help?!

Hi guys, I am looking for some help with the storage on my macbook pro...

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014)

I have had my mac for about 6 weeks now and there is hardly anything on it at all, it's virtually empty yet when I click onto storage it says...

photos: 850mb, audio: 1.31gb, apps: 2.36gb, movies: 14.53gb, other: 99.9gb

I have completely no idea what ‘other’ could be, there's nothing on my mac at all, i haven't downloaded anything and there are very few files on here as you can see. It's driving me crazy, I only have 120gb of storage and it's making it really difficult for me to do anything on here because every two minutes it's popping up saying my start up disk is full.

Does anyone have any idea at all? Any help would be really appreciated!

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Apr 1, 2015 2:26 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Apr 1, 2015 2:43 PM in response to olibomb

If you have Time Machine enabled, then those may well be backup snapshots: For more about snapshots see: About Time Machine local 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.

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Answer 2

olibomb Author

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Apr 1, 2015 2:47 PM in response to Kappy

no, I don't have time machine enable

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Apr 1, 2015 2:50 PM in response to olibomb

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive

1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' 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.

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Answer 4

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,566 points

Apr 1, 2015 4:47 PM in response to olibomb

A significant "Other" size usually means our Spotlight index is incomplete or corrupt. The Storage display uses Spotlight to categorize the things on your hard drive. If it cannot fit the items into the rest of the categories, it puts them in "Other."

Try reindexing Spotlight and see what it looks like after the re-index is complete: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support

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