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Probably a really stupid question....how to see what is in the "other" storage?

M

malcky77

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 12, 2019
247
108
Was looking at how much storage is being used on my base M1 MBA, and there is a section in the storage graph listed as "other", how do I find out what that is?

Screenshot 2021-01-16 at 09.48.04.png


Clicking on manage, then shows me this, but it can't be clicked on to do anything with it?

Screenshot 2021-01-16 at 09.47.33.png
 
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Just giving this a bump seeing as I still do not know how to find out what is in the "other" part of the storage.
 
@Quackers Thanks for the reply, but I do not think it is photos or music as I do not store any photos or music on this laptop.

I have just re-checked the storage again and it has shot up since I started this thread, so I am really puzzled as to what is eating the storage space? As you can see it has now shot up to over 25GB of "other".

Screenshot 2021-03-11 at 07.57.51.png
 
malcky77 said:
@Quackers Thanks for the reply, but I do not think it is photos or music as I do not store any photos or music on this laptop.

I have just re-checked the storage again and it has shot up since I started this thread, so I am really puzzled as to what is eating the storage space? As you can see it has now shot up to over 25GB of "other".

View attachment 1742043
Click to expand...
I see. Do you have Time Machine turned on?
 
I do have it turned on......as it happens I only turned time machine on a couple of days ago and it backs up to a NAS drive I have.....not that I need to have time machine on for this laptop as it really is just a glorified surfing machine for me.....only do a couple of excel spreadsheets to keep track on random things....so only small files.
 
I think I'm right in saying that if "Back up automatically" is ticked then TM will make local snapshots. Maybe as many as one an hour, but not 100% on that.
 
Other is everything else that does not fit into the categories that are shown in the graphics. If you hover over the categories, you will see stuff like Documents, Photos, System etc. There are plenty of file formats that the system does not recognise as "Documents" or some other category and so forth, so it lumps those files into "Other".
 
It's system files and things that can't "categorised", cache, images (dmg) etc

This link may help and provide more info.
www.macworld.co.uk

How to delete Other storage on a Mac

Need more space on your Mac? Wondering what's taking up so much room? Want to delete Other? We have the answers! Plus why Apple no longer has Other in macOS Monterey.
www.macworld.co.uk www.macworld.co.uk
 
Just to update this......seems like for me the "other" stuff must have been back ups.....as now that time machine was turned on last week and a back up eventually happened it seems like my "other" storage has been reduced to 3GB now....instead of over 25GB.

I do not think time machine kicked in until I ticked the option "Backup while on battery power" which was a few days after actually enabling time machine.

Thanks for all the help folks.
 
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Mr Screech said:
Grandperspective is a visual representation of your disk. Works on M1.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the heads up on this app Mr S.

i just purchased it in the App Store and scanned, hold Cr@p what an eye opener.
I had ~500K folders on my hard drive and found ~50k jpeg images (album art) that I didn't even know I had.
Currently cleaning up and enjoying seeing my storage returning.
 
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