What is this in private/var?

Most likely logs and pageing files

/private/var/vm - is where all the virtual memory page/swap files are stored _AND_ the sleepimage which contains a copy of your Macs memory when you put the Mac to sleep. I have about 9GB in my /private/var/vm (my system has 16GB of RAM, and the sleepimage is taking up most of that space). DO NOT try to delete these files. sleepimage is just going to come back when you put the Mac to sleep again, and swapfiles are deleted and recreated as needed after each boot. The more concurrent things you try to run on the Mac that exceed available RAM pushes the size of the swapfiles up.

/private/var/log - is were the system logs are kept. These should not be too big, and if they are then something maybe wrong, and looking at the log files might turn up something that is broken. My /private/var/log has about 150MB which is not much and if you are in that neighborhood, do not worry. If it is a huge number, again this might be something wrong.

If you identify anything specific you think is in excess, then post the file (or files) and their sizes in the form, and someone will tell you if it is safe to delete it.

DO NOT BLINDLY DELETE anything in /private/var, or you may break something OS X is depending on.

OmniDiskSweeper (free download)

<http://www.omnigroup.com/more>

When using OmniDiskSweeper, or any utility that shows all your files... See the following article if you want to run it as root

<http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how_to_recover_missing_hard_drive_space>

Boiler Plate Warnings:

DO NOT delete files in your Home Folder -> Library tree as there are things like your iPhone backups, your email messages, your application preferences, etc… If you think you have found something in your Home Folder -> Library that can be deleted, you should ask first.

DO NOT delete files outside your home folder, as you may end up deleting something essential to Mac OS X, and turn your Mac into an expensive “Door Stop”.

I will point out that you will find some very large files in private -> var -> vm (these are the Mac OS X virtual memory paging files (swapfiles) and where Mac OS X stores the copy of RAM when your Mac is put to sleep). The swapfiles get deleted on reboot, and the sleep image is just going to be created again when you put your Mac to sleep.

If you think you have found something to delete outside your home folder, it would be best to ask first before deleting. There are many examples of people deleting files outside their home folder, or renaming files, or changing the ownership or file permissions, and then their Mac stops running. Do not be one of those people. Ask first.

Where are these updates? Are they in the tmp folder in /var? If so, might be disk images from dmg installers that should have been ejected at the time the updating was completed. Screen shot so we can see exactly what you're talking about?

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/176371/can-i-delete-private-var-folder s-bf

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=42677

I think you can delete the contents of /private/var/folders, but DO NOT delete /private/var/folders itself.