Running out of space on your hard drive can be a big problem for many MacBook users. You can view how much space certain files are using on your hard drive by selecting About This Mac from the Apple menu. Where you can see different categories, such as Audios, Music, Movies, Apps, Backups and how much of your hard drive space is being consumed by these different file types. You may also notice a mysterious category known as “Other.”
The “Other” category is a combination of files that are not recognized as one of the other file types (Music, Apps etc.). The Other category may include system files and caches, apps extensions, user logs, documents (e.g. powerpoints), zip/rar files, mail messages etc. The “Other” category in the About This Mac window may sometimes be big. However this isn’t always a big problem. But if you’re running low on storage space on your Mac, there are ways to fix the “Other” category from taking up so much space. Here is how:
How to remove “other” data in OS X
- Restart your computer. This may help.
- Empty your Trash.
- Remove unused apps.
- You may free up some hard disk space by deleting the Mac OS X sleepimage file. You may remove this file because it will just be created again automatically the next time when your Mac go to sleep. Launch Terminal (Launchpad > Other > Terminal); then type: sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage
- Checking / verifying your hard drive with Disk Utility may also help (Apple Menu > About This Mac > More Info… > Storage > Disk Utility).
- Download and install OmniDiskSweeper. This software will help you see and find large and unused files that you may want to remove. But be careful, do not delete system folders or files. You may also want to backup first.
- You may want to remove your iOS device backups (if you have any). The folder where your backup data can be accessed by going to /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
Related: How to remove “Other” data on iPhone / iPad / iPod