SSD space - 90GB of 'other' What is it?

[Technodynamic]

Loving my macbook 15" rMBP since I got it in July. I transferred all my data from my old macbook pro 13" (mid 2010). It's been running great except I just seem to be using way too much space.

Allocations on my 256GB SSD look like this:

Audio 5 GB
Movies 43 GB
Photos 39 GB
Apps 41 GB
Other 90 GB <----- that's a back breaker

What is eating up so much space? I don't have many documents on here at all to be honest. The OS can't eat up more than 25 GB?

I have 30GB free, but should be seeing well over 100GB

 

[simsaladimbamba]

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

To find out, where you storage capacity is being used, you can use the following free applications:

• DiskInventory X
• OmniDiskSweeper
• JDisk Report
• GrandPerspective

Maybe try a combination of several, if you still can't find the "missing" capacity.

 

[Justinhub2003]

Loving my macbook 15" rMBP since I got it in July. I transferred all my data from my old macbook pro 13" (mid 2010). It's been running great except I just seem to be using way too much space.

Allocations on my 256GB SSD look like this:

Audio 5 GB
Movies 43 GB
Photos 39 GB
Apps 41 GB
Other 90 GB <----- that's a back breaker

What is eating up so much space? I don't have many documents on here at all to be honest. The OS can't eat up more than 25 GB?

I have 30GB free, but should be seeing well over 100GB

I actually recommend Daisy Disk. It has the best UI of any disc utility I've ever used.

See below... and the free version is fine for 90% of people. It will show you a breakout of every single folder.

 

[dusk007]

Audio 5 GB
Movies 43 GB
Photos 39 GB
Apps 41 GB
Other 90 GB <----- that's a back breaker

If this is from the my mac menu rather than the user folder contents it maybe misleading as that one goes by extension not what is in the folders.
So if you have lots of big mkv videos which OSX doesn't recognize as video files it will report them as others.

 

[Technodynamic]

What is other (in the mac menu) usually consist of? OS files I assume?

What is typical to have an entire installation of Mountain Lion? including the temp file it needs for sleep mode? I have 16GB RAM so I assume the tempt file is roughly the same.

 

[rhodewarrior]

I'm guessing that the Time Machine "snapshots" or local backups are to blame. Try this: http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/28/disable-time-machine-local-backups-in-mac-os-x-lion/

Remember, every time you turn off Time Machine and then turn it back on later, you turn the local backups back on.

 

[dusk007]

Other consists of everything that isn't in any of the other available categories.

Just use Daisydisk it will tell you exactly what is using your diskspace. It is a 3MB app that costs nothing to check one volume and it needs about 30-60 sekonds to check an SSD.

 

[Technodynamic]

I used the free version of Daisy Disk and it did help identify more and more things. I've reduced my 'Other' from 90GB to 68 GB. Some of it was things like large emails in Outlook, some of it was iTunes movies, not movies saved in the movies folder. To be safe, I've backed up all my media on a local NAS and just deleted everything. Steam data is saved here as well, so I removed a game I dont play any more.

It's about as lean as its going to get at 68 GB. Free space in now ~127GB.

So mission complete.