Recently I have been getting a pop up that instructs me to delete files on my startup disk, but I had no idea what that meant. I searched online for some guidance, but none of their suggestions seemed to help. According to about my mac, "other" is taking up nearly all of the space on my macintosh hd (298.56 GB)--what can this "other" be and how do i get rid of it? Please help!!!
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Startup Disk is Full and Don't Know Why
- Thread starter SariMayer
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Well for iOS devices, other is mostly the stuff that gets messed up when you disconnect it from syncing. No idea about what it is on Mac. What i woyld do is back up your important data, (preferably using timemachine) and do a system restore. It may seem like at lot of trouble but some file must have gotten corrupted over and over (what??
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)do you have file vault activated? If you do its taking up this additional space. I would suggest you to get an external drive and transfer all your important data on to it and then take it to genuis. When I went they gave me no option but to create a new user name having me lose all my data. (thank god i backed it all up).
If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion storage tab is about, this may help explain:
For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:
- Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
- For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion, space may being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.
OS X Lion: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs - Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.
- Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
- Check your drive with Disk Utility: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
- Try re-indexing your drive: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes