What is other on mac os x

What is “Other” storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out?

Parkinson’s Law can be generalized to suggest demand always expands to match supply. In terms of your computer’s internal storage, that means at some point, no matter how much available internal storage you selected when you bought your Mac, eventually you may find that your drive is getting full and you need to free up space.

I’ll use one of my Mac notebooks, a 2017 15” MacBook Pro with a 500 GB SSD, as an example (even though I have plenty of storage available). One way to determine what is taking up space on your Mac is to use Apple menu > About this Mac > Storage tab. On this Mac, it shows the following:

The different color bands are categories to which your Mac assigns the files, including Apps, Documents, etc., with bands in different shades of gray used for ‘system’ items such as System (macOS files), Trash, and Other. In this case, of the various categories comprising the 186 GB of space used on the SSD, Other takes up the biggest block, using 88 GB of space as shown after clicking the Manage button:

If I wanted to free up space on this Mac, starting with that biggest chunk seems like the most efficient approach. But what is Other? Essentially, it’s a catch-all category for files on the Mac that are simply not categorized as something specific like Apps, Documents, TV, etc. For the most part, these files are created and saved by various apps on the Mac, mainly in the

/Library folder. However, when using Apple menu > About this Mac > Storage tab, you cannot access the files in Other directly. You can navigate to

/Library in Finder by holding the option key and clicking Go menu > Library, but it’s often easier to use a disk management utility to identify the larger files. Personally, I use the free Disk Inventory X; another option is the free OmniDiskSweeper, and there are also apps on the Mac App Store that offer similar features, such as DiskSight and Diskopolis. These apps do not distinguish what is in Other, but they will show everything taking up space on your drive and allow you to sort it by size and to find it, regardless of whether About this Mac > Storage puts it in a specific category or in Other.

On my 2017 15” MBP, for example, Disk Inventory X, shows that the major culprit for using space is Microsoft Outlook data, which is buried several nested folders deep in the

/Library folder and is using 56.4 GB of space (about 30% of my total disk usage; drilling down further shows that 43.6 GB of that is attachments):

In this case, deleting the files directly in Finder is not the best approach (that is one reason the

/Library folder requires the extra step of holding down the option key to access it from the Go menu). Rather, I would need to go into Outlook and use that app’s search/sort tools to identify the emails with large attachments and delete the emails, or just the attachments if desired.

The app(s) using large amounts of storage space in Other, and the best way to free up that storage space, will depend on the app(s) installed. Hopefully the above information enables you find the files on your drive that are taking up the most space. You can then free up needed space by deleting those files or moving them to an external drive.

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What is «Other» and What Can I Do About It?

What is «Other» and What Can I Do About It?

«Other» on your iDevice

When you connect your iPad, iPod Touch, or iPhone to your computer and open iTunes, you will find a graph of the space usage that may look like this:

Note the category at the end called «Other.» What is «Other?» iTunes has 8 standard data categories listed in the Data Bar of iTunes. They are called Apps, Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Books, Photos, and Info. Basically, anything stored on your iDevice that cannot fit into one of those 8 categories is categorized as «Other.» This includes:

Browser cache

Mail cache

Mail messages

Mail attachments

Safari’s Reading List

iTunes Backups

Crud resulting from jailbreaking your iDevice

Game data

Saved data files

Call history

Notes

Media

Voice memos

As you can see there’s a lot of stuff that ends up in «Other.» If you never clean up things the stuff accumulates like old toys in an attic. Soon you find half the space on your iDevice is taken up by «Other.» This is not good. You want to clean things out. So here’s how you do it:

«Other» on Your Computer

On your Mac you may also see an «Other» reported when you check on your drives using About This Mac from the Apple ( ) menu.

When you observe the Storage display via the About This Mac dialog you will see something like this:

Note the similarity to what you might find on your iDevice. There are 5 data categories: Audio, Movies, Photos, Apps, and Backups. Anything else is categorized as «Other.» «Backups» refers to Time Machine Snapshots that are made when the Time Machine backup drive is not available. When the backup drive is finally reconnected, Time Machine is supposed to transfer the snapshots to the Time Machine backup drive then erase the ones on your hard drive. «Apps» only include those found in your Applications folder. Thus, «Other» consists of some of the same types of files found on your iDevice:

Browser cache

Mail cache

Mail messages

Mail attachments

Safari’s Reading List

Saved data files

Notes

Media

Printer drivers

Language files

Preference files

Preference panes

Operating System files (logs, caches, temp files, etc.)

Most all of OS X

This is really a short list of what is categorized as «Other» because it does not fit into any of the other 5 categories.

The problem is you cannot go searching out just any old files on your hard drive and deleting them. If you do you may find that your OS X system no longer works. This could lead to a lengthy reinstallation or even to erasing the hard drive and starting over from scratch. No, this is a process that requires some delicacy and finesse. Firstly, you should search your drive for large files and where they are located. Use a utility such as OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective .

Secondly, follow suggestions below for cleaning up your hard drive of unnecessary files taking up space on your hard drive.

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive

You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.

Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.

Also, see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk .

See Where did my Disk Space go? .

See The Storage Display .

Read Reclaim hard-drive space .

Empty the Trash in order to recover the space the files occupied on the hard drive. If you cannot free up enough space, then you should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.

Thirdly, locate any duplicate files on your hard drive and delete them. You can use one of several utilities designed to locate duplicate files such as:

Hopefully, this discussion will put an end to any concerns you’ve had about «Other.»

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What Is Other in Mac Storage and How Do You Clear It?

Are you facing a “Your startup disk is full” situation? But you have no more movies or photos that you feel you can send to the trash? Don’t despair! You can free up valuable disk space by cleaning the ‘Other’ storage on your Mac. Read this article to learn how to delete all the useless files occupying your precious storage.

Let’s take a look at the Mac ‘Other’ section and optimize your storage.

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Managing your Mac’s disk space usage can be really challenging if you decide to keep track of everything manually.

An alternative way to look after it is with an automatic tool, dedicated to removing unneeded files quickly. That’s where MacKeeper can come in:

1. Download and install MacKeeper
2. Go to the Safe Cleanup tool
3. Hit Start Scan
4. Click Clean Junk Files once the scan is complete

Did you know?

You can enjoy a one-time cleanup for free, so you can take MacKeeper for a test drive without activating the full version.

What is ‘Other’ on Mac storage?

In a nutshell, the ‘Other’ storage on a Mac consists of different types of files that don’t fall into any particular storage category (like videos, photos, music, apps, or mail). The ‘Other’ category also includes junk files and personal files.

To clarify, it might contain the following file types: .pdf, .psd, .doc, browser caches, voice files, message media files stored locally, system caches, archive files like .zip and .dmg disk images, fonts, extensions, app plugins, and other files that don’t belong to the categories above.

These ‘Other’ files can occupy a lot of disk space—by cleaning out the ‘Other’ section on our Mac we were able to recover a whopping 26GB of storage!

How to check what’s taking up ‘Other’ storage on Mac

To discover what’s taking up space on your hard drive (including in the ‘Other’ category):

1. Open the Apple menu
2. Choose About This Mac
3. Click Storage

Here you’ll see an overview of all the available storage on your hard drive, along with the space taken up by various file types. You’ll see a bar divided into several different colored sections, each representing different storage categories. You may need to wait for the system to calculate these sections first.

You’ll see how much space is being taken up by apps, photos, videos, system files, etc. Usually, a major part of the used space is taken up by the ‘Other’ section—often between 10 and 40 percent of your used disk space.

To get more detailed information on what’s taking up your storage, you can use the advanced macOS tools:

1. In the Storage tab click the Manage button

2. Use the left-hand panel to access any category. First, you’ll see the Recommendations window

Have a click around to see how you can optimize your storage. It’s an excellent idea to manage your Trash preferences from here. Turning on the Empty Bin Automatically option is a great example of how to free up storage regularly.

How to delete ‘Other’ storage on Mac

Before we take a closer look at the basics of storage management you need to note one crucial thing: starting with macOS Sierra, macOS categorizes files differently to previous versions. So, if you’re running the latest macOS Big Sur, it will take a lot less effort from you to clean files in ‘Other’.

Important: You can’t delete all files from the ‘Other’ category.

To clean the ‘Other’ category, use this method:

1. Click anywhere on your Desktop
2. Press Command + F
3. Select the This Mac tab
4. Open the first dropdown menu
5. Choose Other
6. Look for and tick File Size and File Extension
7. Click OK

8. Next, look for PDFs, Pages, DMG, or CSV files by typing their extensions in the search bar

9. Delete anything you don’t need

Clear temporary files located in ‘Other’ storage

What are temporary files? Well, macOS simply can’t work without them. The macOS system creates temporary files at the launch of any app to perform various vital processes. However, after the operating system produces these files, they become outdated really quickly. These files aren’t deleted automatically—instead, they are moved to the ‘Other’ category.

We recommend you clean temporary files from the ‘Other’ section regularly to optimize storage and avoid having to deal with a sluggish Mac. Use the following two methods to do this:

1. How to find and get rid of temporary files in ‘Other’ on Mac

1. Open Finder and select Go > Go to Folder from the menu bar
2. Type in

/Library

Look for Application Support

Application Support is a system folder that contains temporary files. The MobileSync folder, for instance, contains old device backups. Review the details of this folder and delete temporary files that you’re sure you don’t need anymore.

2. How to find and clear cache in ‘Other’ on Mac

Different types of cache files can waste disk space. Here’s how to delete cache files from the ‘Other’ category manually:

1. Open Finder and select Go > Go to Folder from the menu bar
2. Type

/Library

Find a Caches folder and copy its contents to the desktop for a backup

4. Move the original Caches folder to Trash

5. Empty your Trash bin

3. How to delete old Time Machine backups

To delete old backups via Time Machine, do the following:

1. Connect your backup drive to your Mac
2. Click on the Time Machine icon in the Menu Bar and choose Enter Time Machine
   Note: if you don’t have the Time Machine pinned to the menu bar: go to System Preferences — Time Machine — tick the Show Time Machine in the menu bar box

3. Look through your backups and choose the one to delete
4. Click on the Gear icon in the Finder window
5. Choose Delete Backup
6. Confirm the action and enter your admin password

How to delete downloaded files

The Downloads folder can easily get cluttered with large files. In particular, the numerous DMG files that are left after an app is installed can, over time, take up a huge amount of available storage space.

Let’s review two methods to remove unneeded downloads:

1. Open Finder and go to Downloads
2. Look through the files
3. Control-click on the documents you don’t need
4. Choose Move to Bin

Or use the macOS storage management tool:

1. Click the Apple logo and go to About This Mac
2. Go to Storage then click the Manage button
3. Navigate to the Documents section and choose Downloads
4. Mark the files you don’t need and hit the Delete button

How to get rid of disk images and archives in ‘Other’ on Mac

Disk image file types are stored in ‘Other’ as well. These files don’t belong to the system files. They are downloaded exclusively by users. That’s why you need to clear ‘Othe’ disk images (DMG files) and archives (ZIP files) manually. To locate these ‘Other’ file types:

1. In the Finder window type .zip or .dmg in the search bar
2. Choose Search This Mac
3. You can also sort the documents by size to quickly find and delete the largest ones

Delete files in ‘Other’ automatically

You can also scan and delete browser extensions by using the Smart Uninstaller tool. You can do it all from one tab, instead of searching through all your web browsers. As an added bonus, you can also review the details of each one of them on the list.

To automatically delete browser extensions using Smart Uninstaller:

1. Navigate to Smart Uninstaller
2. Hit Start Scan
3. Wait for the scan results
4. Go to Browser Extensions
5. Tick the extensions you want to remove
6. Click Remove Selected

Remove app plugins and app extensions from ‘Other’ storage on Mac

App plugins and extensions can be categorized as ‘Other’ as well. To delete unnecessary extensions, you need to delete them from your web browser. It would be best to do this in each browser you use, although that is rather time-consuming.

1. Open your browser
2. Find the extension, plugin, or tab panel, or open Tools
3. Choose the add-ons that you don’t use anymore and remove them

Delete iTunes device backups

Device backups are files that also fall under the ‘Other’ category. If you’ve recently changed to a new iOS device, you might try removing iTunes device backups of your old iPhone or iPad. You’ll be surprised how much storage space can be taken up by such files.

Get rid of everything else from ‘Other’ on Mac

In addition to all the previous steps, you can also remove screensavers from the ‘Other’ section. They don’t usually take up that much space, but every bit helps.

To delete screensavers:

1. Open Finder and select Go > Go to Folder
2. Type in

/Library/Screen Savers

Hit Go

Select any screensavers you don’t want and move them to the Trash

Hopefully, you’ve now learned a whole lot more about how to get back extra storage on your Mac. Although you can clean all of these files manually, it’s often fiddly and time-consuming. Cleaning software can automate the process, and the best cleaners for Mac can do it in just a few clicks. Getting one can save you a significant amount of time and protect you from removing items that you still need on your hard drive, like system files.

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