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'other' storage decreasing rapidly

Hi there,


I am on a macbook air mid 2013 120gb and it has been working fine for the past two years. Over the past month I have noticed that the storage has been disappearing at a fast rate- the 'other' storage has increased by 14gb. I have not been downloading or transferring anything onto my computer, and the storage just seems to be vanishing. I am down to 1.9gb and have been getting warnings as to clearing some space. Have tried emptying the recycle bin, looking for large files etc


Is there any reason for this? Would appreciate any suggestions, thank you!

MacBook Air

Posted on May 5, 2016 5:36 AM

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11 replies

May 5, 2016 6:00 AM in response to lewisfromdevon

For information about the Other category in the Storage display, please see this support article. If the display seems to be inaccurate, try rebuilding the Spotlight index.

Empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. If you use iPhoto, empty its internal Trash first:

iPhoto ▹ Empty Trash

In Photos:

File Show Recently Deleted Delete All

Do the same in other applications, such as Aperture, that have an internal Trash feature. Then restart the computer. That will temporarily free up some space.

According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB of available space on the startup volume (as shown in the Finder Info window) for normal operation—not the mythical 10%, 15%, or any other percentage. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of the data. There is little or no performance advantage to having more available space than the minimum Apple recommends. Available storage space that you'll never use is wasted space.

When Time Machine backs up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as Backups. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself. If you followed bad advice to disable local snapshots by running a shell command, you may have ended up with a lot of data in the Other category. Ask for instructions in that case.

See this support article for some simple ways to free up storage space. A common waste of space is old iTunes backups of mobile devices. As illustrated in this support article, select the Devices tab in the iTunes preferences window, select the backups you want to delete, and click Delete Backups. Keep at least one backup of each device that you still use.

You can more effectively use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) to explore the volume and find out what's taking up the space. You can also delete files with it, but don't do that unless you're sure that you know what you're deleting and that all data is safely backed up. That means you have multiple backups, not just one. Note that ODS only works with OS X 10.8 or later.

Deleting files inside a photo or iTunes library will corrupt the library. Changes to such a library must be made from within the application that created it. The same goes for Mail files.

Proceed further only if the problem isn't solved by the above steps.

ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.

Back up all data now.

Install the app in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.

Triple-click anywhere in the line of text below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.

security execute-with-privileges /A*/OmniDiskSweeper.app/*/M*/* 2>&-

Launch the built-in Terminal application in any one of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.

Paste into the Terminal window by pressing command-V. You'll be prompted for your login password.

The application window will open behind other open windows. When you scan a volume, the window will eventually show all files in all folders, sorted by size. It may take a few minutes for the app to finish scanning.

I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance.

When you're done with the app, quit it and also quit Terminal.

May 6, 2016 9:48 AM in response to lewisfromdevon

There is excessive swapping of data between physical memory (that is, the memory chips on the logic board) and virtual memory (one or more files on the startup volume.) That activity is relatively slow and causes the whole system to be less responsive. It can happen for two reasons:

A long-running process with a memory leak (a kind of bug)

Not enough memory for your usage pattern

Please note that if the cause is a memory leak, installing more memory will not help. That's likely if you already have more than 4 GB of memory. Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination.

These instructions are for OS X 10.9 and later. Some details may be slightly different for earlier versions of OS X.

When you notice the slowdown, open the Activity Monitor application and select All Processes from the View menu, if it's not already selected. Select the Memory tab. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If you don't see that column, select

View ▹ Columns ▹ Real Memory

from the menu bar.

If one process (excluding "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more real memory over time without ever releasing it. Here is an example of how it's done.

"Wired" memory should be less than half of the total. That memory is not swapped, but it makes less physical memory available which may then result in swapping. If most of the memory is wired, that may be an indication of a memory leak in a third-party program that modifies the operating system at a low level. Ask for guidance in that case.

If you don't have an obvious memory leak, the options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.

The next suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:

sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total

where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details.

'other' storage decreasing rapidly

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