"Other" space on HD's. It's NOT Time Machine, or "other graphics files"

chankane · Mar 2, 2013

WTF??

For those that cannot see the pic document. It show's the Storage space for a MacBookProHD and 3 external HD's. They all have their "fair shares" of "Other" disk space, however there is one that carries a whopping 745GB's of OTHER disk space!!! WTH??

I counted the space of the folders and at most it was about 275GB's total, I have no other folder, especially one that holds 745GB's!

This "Other" is NOT: 1) Time Machine, not 2) "oh, you must have other graphic type files in it", and not 3) "e-mail from your mail carrier". I've used Disk Utility to Verify, Erase, etc... no avail...

Very curious if anyone can give a simple answer of: 1) what is it, and 2) how do I get rid of it? (omnisweep is NOT the answer).

Appreciate any logical response!

GGJstudios · Mar 2, 2013

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion/ML storage tab is about, this may help explain:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating my space

For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:

Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion or later, space may be consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.

OS X: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs
Check to see if some of the space is being used by your sleepimage file.
Check the System Memory tab in Activity Monitor to check page outs and swap used. If swap used is significant, restart your computer and track that value under your normal workload. If you have significant page outs under normal use, you could benefit from more RAM.
Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.
Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
Check your drive with Disk Utility: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
Try re-indexing your drive: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question:

Freeing up space in Mac OS X

How OS X and iOS report storage capacity

chankane · Mar 2, 2013

Thanks GGJ!

Thank you for the very comprehensive and thorough reply!

However, I juuuusst found out why.... I needed to empty the trash... Apparently when files are "deleted" they are really just "moved to the trash" which is in some kind of a invisible folder or state called "Other" which needs to to emptied to free up space...

I knew it was a simple thing!

Search

Search

"Other" space on HD's. It's NOT Time Machine, or "other graphics files"

chankane

macrumors newbie

Attachments

GGJstudios

macrumors Westmere

chankane

macrumors newbie

Our Staff