What's Using Up My Hard Drive?

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Level 1

4 points

What's Using Up My Hard Drive?

I have an iMac with 500GB of storage, and when I go to About My Mac -> Storage, it says that I have 358GB of "Other" and I have no idea what it is. About a year ago, I had about 200GB of "Other", and since then, I have barely downloaded any more stuff that should use up much storage. I record and edit videos a lot, so I used to have a lot of "Movies" cramming up my hard drive, but I just cleaned out all of my videos, including from the iMovie library, and also deleted all my iMovie projects, but that hardly freed up any space at all. I don't know what's all this "Other" stuff, since I don't use iPhotos, iTunes, and I don't have any backups. Any idea what it could be? Thanks in advance!

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)

Posted on Jan 24, 2016 6:16 PM

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Answer 1

Duane

Level 10

124,293 points

Jan 26, 2016 12:09 PM in response to LimingWang

OS X: What is "other" space in About This Mac? - Apple Support

what is "Other" when looking at "Storage" on the hard-drive?

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Answer 2

LimingWang Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 25, 2016 7:12 PM in response to Duane

Thanks! I cleared out my caches, I deleted a lot of files that I didn't realize still existed. However, I only managed to free up about 30GB of data. As I mentioned, I used to have about 200GB of "Other", and now I have 377GB, so what's the other 170GB? Do you have any ideas?

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Answer 3

babowa

Level 9

78,574 points

Jan 26, 2016 12:09 PM in response to LimingWang

The usual suspects are movies, videos, and photos. Do you have a lot of those? FWIW, it really doesn't matter what you had a year ago - space available/used changes by the minute so to speak - as soon as you add a video or anything else, it'll change. It'll also change when you empty the trash.

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Answer 4

LimingWang Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 29, 2016 8:23 PM in response to Duane

I just recorded for about two hours in quicktime player, and the file that resulted was about 20 GB. This was when I had about 60GB of free space. I trimmed the clip so that it is only about an hour long, so it should only be about 10 GB, but now I only have about 5 GB free. Why does this happen? Shouldn't I have about 50 GB free?

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Answer 5

Duane

Level 10

124,293 points

Jan 29, 2016 8:31 PM in response to LimingWang

Not sure what you used to trim the video but that application may have kept the trimmed clips in an undo temporary space. Or maybe even kept the previous version in case you wanted to go back to them.

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Answer 6

babowa

Level 9

78,574 points

Jan 29, 2016 8:42 PM in response to LimingWang

When you start editing/rendering video, there are a lot of scratch files and, until you export it in its complete form (with all files), you need to have about as much free hard drive space as you have temp files (actual recommendation is for twice the hard drive space), so I would not start any video project with only 60 GB of free space. I can easily amass 100 - 150 or more GB of temp files in an HD project, so I keep at least 300 GB of free space to give the process a chance to work well.

So, there is no easy answer to your question unless you check whatever app you were using to see what, if any, scratch files were created and saved and where.

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Answer 7

LimingWang Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 30, 2016 6:08 AM in response to babowa

I record with Quicktime Player and I used the Quicktime Player app to trim the clip FYI. Right now, I deleted pretty much all of my other stuff, and I only have about 15 GB free. There is about 450+ GB of "Other", which was nearly 100 GB more since I created this thread. A few months ago, I also noticed that the disk filled up really quickly when I recorded, even if I didn't save. Could there be that the computer is trying to save those files? Is there a way to delete those temporary files?

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Answer 8

Duane

Level 10

124,293 points

Jan 30, 2016 6:57 AM in response to LimingWang

Where are QuickTime Player's temp files stored?

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