How to I clean up Other

Hello, bench126. Welcome to Apple Support Communities!

We see you want to know more about cleaning up the “Other” category of local storage.

The “Other” category of local storage is a “catchall” for everything that doesn’t fit any of the other named Categories.

It included caches, “Trashes”, and various operating system logs.

Are you asking about the “Other” storage on macOS, or on iDevices?

After trying a clean-up tool and all the system recommendations for optimizing storage, I still had almost 300 GB taken up by "system". Stumbled on a fix from an old article and wanted to share it here. Almost all of that space was cache files that I had never cleaned up or been aware of over years and years of use.

To view these, go to Finder > Go > Go to Folder and type "~/Library/cache".

I found that almost 130 websites and apps were storing cache files in this folder. Some people may actually need some of these files and I don't fully even understand what they do, so I don't recommend what I did next to everyone, but after a few job changes I use my computer solely for fun these days and I decided to delete them all since I didn't have much to lose. I selected every folder inside the cache folder, moved them to the trash, and emptied the trash. I first noticed the count of files it was deleting when it hit something like 1,600 and hadn't slowed down. It turned out that there were over 300,000 files in there. After it was done emptying the trash, I restarted my computer and I had freed up about 300 GB. Totally insane. Haven't noticed any loss in functionality yet, but I'll update this answer if I run into anything.

Thank you, Wesley1947!

I don’t believe macOS has a “Trash” category, so your Trash will show up under the “Other” category. The “Other” category is a “catch all” category for anything and everything that doesn’t fit under any of the other named categories of storage.

Unfortunately, macOS (and iOS and iPadOS) doesn’t provide a user interface for “tracking down” files that are categorized as “Other”.

Furthermore, as best I know, and as bluesky95 appears to confirm, things like “caches” are listed under the “System” storage category.

So, is your Trash empty?

Is your macOS up to date?

Please let us know how things are going!

How do I find out what is in "Other"?

How do I reduce "Other" in storage?

Other is not a place or location, it's a name of a file category that doesn't match any of the standard categories.

On macOS