Freeing Hard Drive Space: "Others"?

[boba7523]

As you can see, there's 37.98 gb of "others." on my 2010 MBP Mac OSX Lion. My brother's MBP only has i think 9 gb. What is contained in my "others" exactly? I have moved my photos, videos, most of my docs from my SSD to my external hard drive now. Are the "others" cache? Please help, i need to free up space!

 

[atlanticza]

As I can't see...

 

[GGJstudios]

As you can see, there's 37.98 gb of "others." on my 2010 MBP Mac OSX Lion. My brother's MBP only has i think 9 gb. What is contained in my "others" exactly? I have moved my photos, videos, most of my docs from my SSD to my external hard drive now. Are the "others" cache? Please help, i need to free up space!

Use DiskInventory X (pre-Lion), OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. For Time Machine users on Lion, Time Machine local snapshots may be consuming space.

 

[theSeb]

Image

As you can see, there's 37.98 gb of "others." on my 2010 MBP Mac OSX Lion. My brother's MBP only has i think 9 gb. What is contained in my "others" exactly? I have moved my photos, videos, most of my docs from my SSD to my external hard drive now. Are the "others" cache? Please help, i need to free up space!

Hi. The question "what is other" and "where is my disk space" has been asked many times before in the last couple of weeks. You'll find many threads that will answer your question by using the search function.

 

[boba7523]

Use DiskInventory X (pre-Lion), OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. For Time Machine users on Lion, Time Machine local snapshots may be consuming space.

I have my time machine turned off.


So all the apps you mentioned are for pre-lion? It doesn't work on Lion?

 

[thundersteele]

discinventoryX works just fine on Lion.

 

[GGJstudios]

I have my time machine turned off.

So all the apps you mentioned are for pre-lion? It doesn't work on Lion?

They all work on Lion. At one time there were reports that Disk Inventory X didn't, but perhaps that's changed. I haven't tested it.

 

[thundersteele]

Just been testing. Maybe it doesn't work that well...

About This Mac, Storage: 67.56 GB free/120.47 total | 0.46 GB backup
Macintosh HD, Get Info: 68.02 GB available/120.47 total

this is consistent, since OSX considers the 0.46 GB backup "available." About a week ago, this "backup" was over 7 GB. I think the local snapshots are deleted after a week or so, provided that other backups are being done. I decided not to deactivate it, despite having a very small SSD.

Now, DiscInventoryX: Macintosh HD, Capacity: 112.2 GB, used 49.3 GB, Free 62.9 GB.

This is nowhere near the other two results. DIX sees the 4GB sleepimage, so that's not it. There is a 8 GB discrepancy in total capacity and a 3 GB discrepancy in the used storage.