Help with recovering drive space and Disk Utility???

[AeroBar]

Hello,

I'm trying to recover lost hard drive space.

I have a MacBook Air 2013 with a 60GB hard drive running Mavericks. For the last few months the most free space I can have is 10 gigs enough I have very little in the way of extra apps or files. "Other" was always very high - usually around 20GBs.
I did a big clean up this morning and after removing some apps and their associated files I have brought my free space up to 22GBs

Apart from pre-installed Apple apps all I have is the three iWorks programs, Onyx and a 5 gig iPhoto library.

Checking About this Mac, I see that Other is down to less than 5 gigs and Movies are showing 10 gigs - I cannot find any thing on my machine to account for such a high volume of video files. ** I reindexed Sotlight and now I have 3.29 GBs of Movies and 16 gigs of Other.

How much hard drive space should Mavericks and the pre-installed Apple apps take? Is 22 gigs of free space reasonable on a 60GB MacBook?

Can anyone help with these issue?

I want to upgrade to Sierra but is like to solve this problem first. Is it possible that upgrading would fix them it? Or should I sort it out in Mavericks first?

Cheers

 

[Weaselboy]

How much hard drive space should Mavericks and the pre-installed Apple apps take? Is 22 gigs of free space reasonable on a 60GB MacBook?

A new Mac out of the box with just the OS ad iLife and iWorks apps installed will use about 20GB of space. Then there is some space used for swap files and caches that build up a bit... plus your 5GB iPhoto library... all total I don't think you have a problem.

Even on a mac with zero videos, that Movies section will show some data from the many videos that are part of the OS. Like that moving Touchpad and mouse demo stuff in system prefs.

 

[AeroBar]

A new Mac out of the box with just the OS ad iLife and iWorks apps installed will use about 20GB of space. Then there is some space used for swap files and caches that build up a bit... plus your 5GB iPhoto library... all total I don't think you have a problem.

Even on a mac with zero videos, that Movies section will show some data from the many videos that are part of the OS. Like that moving Touchpad and mouse demo stuff in system prefs.

Thanks for the reply and information.

I had been told (and read) several times that Mavericks should only use about 10 gigs.

If I upgrade to Sierra will I lose more drive in addition to what the current OS uses?

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks for the reply and information.

I had been told (and read) several times that Mavericks should only use about 10 gigs.

If I upgrade to Sierra will I lose more drive in addition to what the current OS uses?

Mavericks alone uses about 10GB, but you said you had the default iLife and iWorks apps on there also, so that about another 10GB.

Sierra won't use any more space. It will remove Mavericks as it upgrades to Sierra. Actually, most of us have found Sierra uses a little less disk space after upgrading.

 

[AeroBar]

Mavericks alone uses about 10GB, but you said you had the default iLife and iWorks apps on there also, so that about another 10GB.

Sierra won't use any more space. It will remove Mavericks as it upgrades to Sierra. Actually, most of us have found Sierra uses a little less disk space after upgrading.

Thanks again.

 

[julescilib]

Hello,

Can anyone help me understand/fix this problem ? I don't understand how to clear the Other. Thanks!!

 

[Weaselboy]

Hello,

Can anyone help me understand/fix this problem ? I don't understand how to clear the Other. Thanks!!

Other is everything that does not fall into one of the remaining listed categories. Things like the OS and documents for example. So depending on what you have on your computer, this may be normal.

Also, that readout is notoriously inaccurate and pretty worthless. It gets its data from the Spotlight index, and sometimes a reindex of Spotlight will make it more accurate for a time. Try running the command below in Terminal to reindex Spotlight.

sudo mdutil -E /

 

[julescilib]

.....Also, that readout is notoriously inaccurate and pretty worthless. It gets its data from the Spotlight index, and sometimes a reindex of Spotlight will make it more accurate for a time. Try running the command below in Terminal to reindex Spotlight.

sudo mdutil -E /

Thank you very much kind sir,
cleared it up a bit, but still not sure whats taking this much space. i dont have anything on my laptop 'cept for music.

 

[Weaselboy]

Thank you very much kind sir,
cleared it up a bit, but still not sure whats taking this much space. i dont have anything on my laptop 'cept for music.

How much music do you have? Try running the command below in Terminal and give it a minute to complete, then post the output up here. It will show all the base folders and their size in GB so we can see if anything looks off.

sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /

 

[julescilib]

...

sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /

thank you for the taking the time. this is what it gave me.

 

[Weaselboy]

thank you for the taking the time. this is what it gave me.

Nothing really looks off there. You do have 172GB of data in the Users area. That would be all your personal files. Does that sound about right? If not, you can use a tool like OmniDiskSweeper to look in that space for large files.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/

 

[julescilib]

Thank you for the app! I will go trough it.