System Migration and "Other"

[chaofahn]

Hi folks, I am close to buying a new Mac and have been looking at various ways to transfer my important files over to my new computer.

I've been looking at OSX's system migration tool, but one thing that's stopping me from choosing that path is the fact that I have an obscene amount of "OTHER" files on my Mac. Like, around 200GB of this "other" category.

I've tried getting rid of it, but I'm guessing perhaps it's old log files, spotlight settings or old Time Capsule snapshots etc. I'm also guessing that System Migration will transfer it over to my new Mac, leaving only a measly 50GB of free space.

So is this how it is? Do I just backup my photos, music and configure the new Mac from scratch? Are there any other ways? Are my assumptions about System Migration correct?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Weaselboy]

Whether that gets moved over by Migrations Assistant will depend on what is causing the problem. Hard to say.

The Time Machine local backups are not listed in Other, so that's not it.

Can you post up a screenshot of that storage graphic so we can take a look? Sometimes that graphic is wrong because the Spotlight index is corrupted and a Spotlight reindex will help.

You can try reindexing Spotlight then look at Other again and see what it says.

Run the command below in Terminal to reindex Spotlight.

sudo mdutil -E /