What's this 'other' occupying space?

[entatlrg]

Looking at available space on my hard drive I noticed something called 'other' is occupying 160bg on a 256 ssd, but I only have 70gb of data on the drive.

It's not time machine back ups ... just a mystery and I can't find a way to delete it or recover the space.

 

[thundersteele]

DiscInventoryX, Omnidiscsweeper, DaisyDisc are names of some free and very useful tools that help you understand what is occupying your HD space.

 

[GGJstudios]

For space issues, there are a few things you can try. Some may not apply:

• Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
• For Time Machine users on Lion, space may being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.
• 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 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.