135GB of Other on this computer

[nightlong]

I’m trying to help a friend clean up the hard disk on her full MacBook Air. She has 135 Gb of ‘other’. I have no idea what that could be, can you help? How do you delete this, and do you have to be careful as some of it might be to do with the operating system or Library?

Her other files aren’t so huge, the biggest being 25 Gb of photos.


I have never seen such a huge ‘Other‘ file.

 

[auxbuss]

Try booting into safe mode. That often seems to "clean up" some stuff.

Also, if using Time Machine, check for local snapshots. They can be huge. You can list them with: `tmutil listlocalsnapshots /`

You can safely delete them.

fyi, my Other is 2.48 Gb.

 

[nightlong]

Thanks I’ll try the time machine solution

 

[Abazigal]

I’m trying to help a friend clean up the hard disk on her full MacBook Air. She has 135 Gb of ‘other’. I have no idea what that could be, can you help? How do you delete this, and do you have to be careful as some of it might be to do with the operating system or Library?

Her other files aren’t so huge, the biggest being 25 Gb of photos.


I have never seen such a huge ‘Other‘ file.

You can try omnidisksweeper to see what files are taking up space on her laptop and nuke them from there.

 

[auxbuss]

You can try omnidisksweeper to see what files are taking up space on her laptop and nuke them from there.

Alternatively, if you know your way around the command line, then try ncdu – my preference for this kind of thing.

 

[nightlong]

I don’t know my way around the command line, so don’t know how to use the code you gave

 

[icloudUser]

Another thing that worked for me was to sign out from Icloud. That "should" delete the caches and sign back in again afterwards.

 

[Wackery]

I had this problem too, it's probably a time machine back up file that's somehow stuck.

 

[CPL593H]

I had this problem too, it's probably a time machine back up file that's somehow stuck.

How did you clear it up? Having a similar issues on a 2010 MBA I’m working on for a friend.

 

[Wackery]

How did you clear it up? Having a similar issues on a 2010 MBA I’m working on for a friend.

I can't remember exactly where I found the information, but it's something like this link below and I remember having to use a console command. Basically there was a giant time machine back up that was sitting around doing nothing and not even being used for time machine anymore, so it was a giant storage parasite.

How to use Time Machine local snapshots to recover data on your Mac in 2022

If you use Time Machine to back up your Mac and something goes wrong with your external hard drive, you can still recover data with local snapshots!

www.imore.com

 

[CPL593H]

Cheers, will give it a shot!

 

[iAssimilated]

I have a huge amount of "Other" on my 8,1 Mac mini as well, but I know what it is. I use PlayOnMac for the game Star Trek Online and that is what the "Other" is... apparently macOS does not know how to categorize the pseudo Windows C: drive files. The game alone eats almost 250-300GBs of my external drive.

Before cleaning her drive you might want to know more about what your friend uses her Mac for? That might shed some light on what those files are.

 

[iAssimilated]

Just a follow up, I checked my mini this morning and found that my Steam Library is also considered "Other" in the "About This Mac -> Storage" section. Brings my total "Other" data to 478GBs

 

[CPL593H]

Downloaded DaisyDisk and that shed some light on it. Mostly iPhone backups, and message backups too. Surprisingly it wasn’t Time Machine related at all. Larger SSD on order from OWC, so it won’t be an issue soon enough.