Zero space on my macbook air?

I got a 128GB 1.6GHz MacBook Air last year for school, thinking there was no way I could ever fill up a hard drive with that much, so why shell out even more for 256GB? I'm sorely regretting that now, but I don't know if I should be.


I have no space left. Zero. Zilch. I'll let you see for yourself.User uploaded file


The only real culprit I can find is my Photos library. It is nearly 20GB, which just baffles me because I have just over 2000 pictures, and mayyybe 20 videos in there. Of those videos, the largest one is 1GB, and I know there's one or two that are upwards of 500MB, but most of them are under 100MB. I'm not a computer expert but I know that those should NOT be taking up that much space. I also don't understand why in Finder it says my Photos library is 20GB in size when the usage bar says my photos only take up 8GB of space.


When I go into Finder, hit "All My Files" and sort by size, I have 9 - you read that right - nine files bigger than 100MB. I have 1462 files in total, and 950 of them are 10KB to 1MB in size. There is no way my files could possibly taking up that much space. I have downloaded maybe 3 applications on this computer besides what came on it - one was Chrome, one was SelfControl, and the other is the Kindle App (which I wanted to use for my textbooks this year but can't until I get this Mac cleaned up).


Can anyone tell me where in the world this 'other' is coming from? It's driving me absolutely crazy. For the record, I've already deleted old iPhone backups and the one I have is not very big. Does this have anything to do with the fact that I'm still running on Yosemite and not El Capitan? Appreciate the help in advance!

MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2015), OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Jul 29, 2016 11:15 PM

Reply
1 reply

Jul 29, 2016 11:47 PM in response to agriffith14

How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive


  1. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
  2. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
  3. Also, see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
  4. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
  5. Be sure to Empty the Trash to recover the space.
  6. Replace the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
  7. Use OmniDiskSweeper or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

What is "Other" and What Can I Do About It?- Apple Support Communities

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

Pondini Florida

Re: HELP 175 gb of other on hard drive

Jun 17, 2012 7:14 PM (in response to craiglonie)


See The Storage Display for details on Backups and Other.


Backups on your internal HD are Local Snapshots (separate from "Other"); don't worry about them, since they're deleted after a week or if your drive gets over 80% full. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #30 for the gory details.


Backups on an external are your normal Time Machine backups; Time Machine will manage them automatically, too.

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Zero space on my macbook air?

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