You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Not Enough Storage? How do I delete "other"

I'm trying to clear out space so I can make more space. I have no idea what "other" is any why its taking up 218.86 GB of space. Please help!


I have a Macbook Air (mid 2012) OS X El Capitan version 10.11.6


MacBook Air 13", OS X 10.11

Posted on Mar 22, 2020 7:35 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 23, 2020 5:38 AM

Follow this doc provided by Apple as a guideline to make your storage clutter-free.

https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT206996


You could gauge what is contained in "other" by simply studying what the partition contains.

I hope this helps.

2 replies

Mar 22, 2020 7:41 PM in response to Jwills88

The Storage Report is not trustworthy.


OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/


If that doesn't find it then...


Purging local backups

Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.

Start Terminal from spotlight.

At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates.

Hit enter.


Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.

Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.


Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.

Hit enter.

Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required


http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html

Not Enough Storage? How do I delete "other"

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.