50+ gbs of 'other' storage

[larold]

Hi folks,

Sorry this is a bit of a popular one but I've tried a few different things over the last few hours and nothing seems to be working. I've got 55 gbs of storage being used in 'other' but I cant work out where its coming from. I've downloaded and run Omni disk sweeper and it doesnt seem to show up there. I'm pretty sure it appeared when I deleted some large video data files which disappeared from the system but doesnt seem to have freed up the storage, I then read somewhere that running disk repair could fix it which I've tried in both recovery and normal desktop modes but to no avail.

Any help much appreciated! thanks

 

[joshdammit]

I use an app called Daisy Disk that narrows down pretty effectively where your storage is going.

In my experience, Other could be things in your ~/Library folder. If you use Adobe Premiere, for example, it can also cache the hell out of your storage (although I don't remember if that's actually in the Library folder or not.) Any iCloud files are also stored in the Library technically, and might be classified as other.

Either way, I'd recommend you use an app that shows exactly how much storage each folder takes up.

 

[larold]

Thanks for that, thats a pretty neat program. 40gb of it seems to be under Library/caches - something called Cloudkit

Any idea if I can safely delete that?

 

[larold]

com.apple.documents is the next extension

 

[Fuchal]

Those are iCloud file caches. You can delete them, but the system will delete them as necessary on its own. You may also find that the same files get recreated over time.

 

[larold]

ah so theres no danger of losing anything I have stored in icloud by deleting them all? I think they all came from the large files I recently deleted

 

[larold]

all done, thanks for the advice 👍