“Other” in disk Utility

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Level 1

7 points

“Other” in disk Utility

The Disk Utility on my Mac shows 100GB of usage by 'Other'.

I had a look inside '~/Library/Caches', but I did not see anything taking up too much space in there.

I even tried using an app called "Clean my Mac". It didn't do much good.

Here is my question: How do I find and delete the files that are taking up nearly 100GB of space and are marked as 'other' in Disk Utility.

I am on El Capitan on a 13 inch 2015 Mac Book Pro.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch,Early 2015), OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Jan 15, 2017 10:42 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

tjk

Level 9

51,126 points

Jan 17, 2017 11:49 PM in response to r.rakshak

Hi,

Some info about "Other" https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202867

Use one or more of the following to see exactly where your space is being used:

https://www.omnigroup.com/more (OmniDiskSweeper)

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net (Grand Perspective)

http://www.derlien.com/downloads/ (Disk Inventory X)

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

361,849 points

Jan 17, 2017 11:50 PM in response to r.rakshak

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.
Free up storage space on your Mac.
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.

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

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Answer 3

tygb

Level 9

64,726 points

Jan 16, 2017 8:53 PM in response to r.rakshak

Locate large files

You can find your largest files and then compress them or move them to another disk.

In the Finder, choose Go > Home, or press Shift-Command-H.
Choose File > Find, or press Command-F.
Click the Kind pop-up menu, then choose Other.
Below “Select a search attribute,” select the File Size checkbox. Make sure no other checkboxes are selected, then click OK.
Click the “equals” pop-up menu, then choose “is greater than.” Click the “KB” pop-up menu, then choose “MB.”
Enter a minimum file size. A good starting point is 100 MB. You can change the value to see more or fewer results.Searching begins as soon as you type a file size. It may take a moment for all the search results to appear.

An article : macOS Sierra: Increase disk space

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Answer 4

OGELTHORPE

Level 9

57,317 points

Jan 17, 2017 3:32 AM in response to r.rakshak

First get rid of CleanMyMac. It will do no good and can corrupt your MBP.

The display you posted cannot be relied upon since there is a bug in the program that generates it. Sometimes but no always a Spotlight rebuild will correct it.

Follow Kappy's advice and you will solve you problem.

Ciao.

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