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'other' in storage

The "other" storage section takes up 63GB (out of 121GB total used). I can't find any way to clean up this area. Any recs for doing this without a third party app?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.4

Posted on Sep 7, 2021 1:03 PM

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Posted on Sep 7, 2021 1:07 PM

And you won't because the Other category is controlled by the operating system. See used and available storage space on your Mac, which contains this particular note about Other:



3 replies

Sep 7, 2021 2:00 PM in response to Natasha.Jones

A third-party application won't help as the operating system is on a secure, read-only partition. That's why you cannot override the Other category because you don't have access, even if you knew which files were involved.


My M1 Mini is shut down every evening before I retire. Its Other category is around 40.79 GB, but unlike you, I have a 512GB drive, and yes, 62 GB of Other is annoying on a 120GB drive. My 2014 MacBook Air with a 120GB drive is running macOS 11.5.2, and has an Other category of 35GB.


What you can do is select menu > About This Mac > Storage > Manage… and then click Review Files button in the Reduce Clutter section. There are several tabbed categories showing files in descending size order that you may have in your account that you can selectively remove to give you more storage. This is not reducing Other though.

'other' in storage

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