Freeing up disk space

[mhuntoon]

I found something online that showed me how to clear the "backup" space in the About This Mac/Storage, but the bigger culprit for me is "other". I freed up 20gb or so with turning Time Machine off and restarting my computer. I really need to free up some of the 53gb+ in the "other" portion, though.

Any ideas?

Also, how do I keep the backups from accumulating so I won't have to do this again? I use Time Machine with my external WD My Passport 2tb drive. Am I doing something wrong?

 

[Weaselboy]

I found something online that showed me how to clear the "backup" space in the About This Mac/Storage, but the bigger culprit for me is "other". I freed up 20gb or so with turning Time Machine off and restarting my computer. I really need to free up some of the 53gb+ in the "other" portion, though.

Any ideas?

Also, how do I keep the backups from accumulating so I won't have to do this again? I use Time Machine with my external WD My Passport 2tb drive. Am I doing something wrong?

What you are seeing there with that Backups space used it totally normal if you are using Time Machine. That space is used for Time Machines local snapshots, and you can just ignore it and the OS will start to erase that space as the drive becomes full.

If you want to turn the feature off, run the command below in Terminal. Each time you turn TM off then on, you will need to rerun the command.

sudo tmutil disablelocal

What "Other" is is essentially everything that does not fall into one of the other categories there.

You can use something like OmniDisksweeper to look over your drive for space hogs if you like. Just be careful about deleting system files and such that are not sure what they do as it can brick your OS.

 

[mhuntoon]

What you are seeing there with that Backups space used it totally normal if you are using Time Machine. That space is used for Time Machines local snapshots, and you can just ignore it and the OS will start to erase that space as the drive becomes full.

If you want to turn the feature off, run the command below in Terminal. Each time you turn TM off then on, you will need to rerun the command.

sudo tmutil disablelocal

What "Other" is is essentially everything that does not fall into one of the other categories there.

You can use something like OmniDisksweeper to look over your drive for space hogs if you like. Just be careful about deleting system files and such that are not sure what they do as it can brick your OS.

Thank you, weaselboy. I downloaded Omnidisksweeper last night after seeing several other recommendations for it online. I was able to get rid of a little bit, but not much to be honest. As you said "be careful" - I was far too nervous to just delete things I didn't recognize.