Lots of "other" data on mac

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seg0517 Author

Level 1

5 points

Lots of "other" data on mac

Product: Macbook Pro Retina. Purchased July 2014.

500gb internal drive

Memory: 16gb 1600 MHz DDR3

Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7

OS X 10.9.5

According to my math (including some files not shown here) I am using approx. 231gb of space, but the mac claims that I only have 51.44gb of free space remaining. This has been dogging me for months and I would like to free space up.
I am a big user of Logic Pro X, Final Cut Pro X, and iZotope RX Advanced Audio Editor (all very storage-hungry programs).

I cannot see any visible files that can account for approx. 217gb of unusable space.

What function can I perform to free up this space without deleting anything else on the Mac?

Would restoring from a Time Capsule Backup following a format of the Startup Disk fix this?

Thank you.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), Storage issue

Posted on Aug 31, 2016 4:45 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,017 points

Aug 31, 2016 4:50 PM in response to seg0517

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

How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive

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

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Answer 2

Eric Root

Level 10

685,293 points

Sep 1, 2016 12:14 PM in response to seg0517

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

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