What is "other data"

[andrewcollinson]

i had posted a previous thread about not being able to connect to my time machine but that has now been fixed.

i still have a problem with losing disk space to what i don't know.

i have used cleanupmymac2 and got rid of files and apps i didn't use this freed up about 2gb.yet when looking on "about this mac" under storage i see 78 gb of "other data" ie not audio movies or photos.I have no large files under my documents

i did a search with finder for large files but there are only a few which i want to keep.where can see what makes up this 78gb?

i did notice when I started to do the timemachine back up my free space started to drop very quickly so i halted the back up.how are these related?

thanks

 

[GGJstudios]

i have used cleanupmymac2

I would not recommend CleanMyMac or its variants, based on the number of complaints that have been posted in this forum and elsewhere. As an example: CleanMyMac cleaned too much. Here's a recent example. While you may not have experienced problems yet, enough people have that it's wise to avoid it, especially since there are free alternatives that have better reputations, such as Onyx.

You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Most only remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.

These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. In fact, deleting some caches can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.

Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.

Five Mac maintenance myths​

yet when looking on "about this mac" under storage i see 78 gb of "other data" ie not audio movies or photos.I have no large files under my documents

i did a search with finder for large files but there are only a few which i want to keep.where can see what makes up this 78gb?

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion/ML storage tab is about, this may help explain:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating my space​

Freeing up drive space in Mac OS X

 

[dusk007]

Probably timemachine local backups.
Try daisydisk. Nice GUI tells you everything you want to know in administrator mode. Free trial which works fine.