Free Other Space On Mac

First, let's see how much free space you have on your Mac and see what's taking up most of the space on your Mac.

You can click manage here and get some recommendations to clear more space.

Maintaining your Mac’s storage space by avoiding the accumulation of junk or unnecessary files, such as those in the Other storage category, keeps your machine in good health and makes it. Dumping old downloads is a tried-and-true way to reduce clutter on your Mac and free up disk space for your vacation photos and other useful files. Here’s how to do it: Open Finder. Select Downloads on the left. Right-click the useless files and select the Move to Trash option from the drop-down menu. Empty the Trash.

You can also look at other folders here and delete files or move them to external hard drives.

If the other folder is taking a lot of space on your Mac, check out this video:

How To Delete 'Other' Files From Any Mac

You can also use CleanMyMacX to do a system scan and remove a lot of space on your Mac without any manual actions: (affiliate link)

For external hard drives, here are two I recommend (amazon affiliate)

How to Free Space on Mac

Hey everyone. In today's video, I'm going to show you how to free up some space on your Mac, and this works on every Mac from your laptop, all the way to an iMac or Mac Pro and I'm going to show you a few different things to try, but before you do anything, I recommend running a time machine backup because we are going to permanently delete things on your Mac.

The time machine backup basically mirrors everything you have on an external hard drive and then if you lose anything, you could just go ahead and run that time machine backup. Now I have an entirely different video on how to use a time machine to back up your Mac. This is not the video for that, but I recommend you wash down and you do that first.

Let me show you a couple of things. Now, these are external hard drives and I'll put a couple of them in the description box below this video if you want to check them out. But basically, these do with the time machine is your entire computer gets backed up to one of these. So if anything goes wrong or you delete something, you shouldn't have.

You'll always have it on the sectional hard drive and you can back it up from there. These are the two that I recommend and I've used them for about 10 years of so doing backups on my Mac now, after you've done a time machine backup, let's jump here on the Mac and clear some space. So the first thing we want to do is we want to go up here to the Apple logo and press about this Mac and then on this page, this is just going to tell you everything that your computer has like your processor, memory and things like that. But we want to go to the storage tab right here. This right here is your internal hard drive. This is the hard drive sitting on your laptop or your computer desktop and it's going to basically take a second to tell you how much space you've used up and how much space is available and it's going to break this down into different categories in a second. Ignore these two. These are the external hard drives that I mentioned and you could see, even one of these is almost filled up here, almost four terabytes of information, but I make videos.

So that's a little unusual to fill up this much space. You typically will never fill off four terabytes of the hard drive if you don't make videos, but let's focus on this. Now I have a one terabyte flash drive on this computer and let's take a look. It says two 81, 2 documents. Apps are taking up a bunch of parallels.

I'm running windows actually on this Mac. So that's taken up some space and others. Look at that almost 400 gigabytes. I actually have a whole separate video on how to clear other sections, but I will touch upon it in this video as well. So now that we have a good understanding of how much space we have left and what's taken up this space, let's go ahead and manage that.

Just click this option, manage, and we'll get to a more advanced option in a second. But right now under manage. Is this story in iCloud. A lot of times your files, photos, messages are taken up a good amount of space. So instead of capturing those on your computer's hard drive, you could store them in the cloud.

If I press this year, it's going to tell me that I could basically put documents, photos, and messages and store them in iCloud. Now, most likely this is going to ask you to. Get more space and buy more space in iCloud, but it's relatively cheap. I think for about $3, you could get a couple of hundred gigabytes worth, which is a lot of space.

But if you don't want to do that, you could skip the section. I'll show you some other ways to free up some space. But this is definitely one of the places to look. The next one is optimizing storage. I've already done this, but you're going to get an option to optimize storage here and this removes a lot of TV shows, especially if you use Apple TV, movies, and TV shows through Apple TV, that's going to take a lot of space.

So I definitely recommend you do this next. Then typically you want to empty your trashcan and you will, you could turn this on, on automatic. Now I don't have my turn on, but you could come down here, press your trashcan and then press empty right here. If there is a lot of information here that typically tends to empty a few gigabytes, if you just have things sitting in the trash, you could always turn it on over here as well.

Space

Then this is really easy to use. Reduce clutter. If you press review files, what it does is it shows you all your files on your computer and you could go ahead and press the size option, and it's going to show you things by how big they are. It's just shorting them by size. So look at this windows is taken out five gigs here.

This video file is taken out 4 gigs here. These drone shots are taken up 3 gigs, a piece, so I could easily see what's taken up space and if I want to either delete it, I could press delete here. Or typically what I do is I go down here show in finder. So I'll select this one, 4 gigs showing finder, and here's the file and then I'll open up my external hard drive and actually drag this into there. So it's just sitting on my external hard drive now instead of my computer's internal hard drive. So let me go back to recommendations. So those are the 4 things that Apple is going to tell you to do here in that order.

Then you could go on the left side and you could see the application is taken up 81 gigabytes. So I could go see, I have 2 versions of adobe premiere pro. Maybe I could delete this one that will save me four gigs and I could basically see again by size, what's taken up the most amount of space, and press delete.

I'll show you one other way at the end of this video, to help you uninstalled apps, which is the way I use them. I typically don't do it here because it leaves a lot of things behind. If you just delete the app here and not the supporting documents and you could keep looking here. If you have music creation here, you could just remove that library.

I never use garage band so I could save a couple of gigs here. I could go to music and again, see if I have anything selected, and press delete here. Photos I have sunk up already with iCloud, so not much going on here. But there may be a good amount being used up with photos and again, the other folder, look at that.

It's still 200 gigs showing over here on the other folder. So let me show you the last option and my favorite way to clean up space. After I go through what Apple's helping me do and this is a very reputable company, clean my Mac X is a software that I use on all my Macs and I have a link in the description for it.

You could download a completely for free and do a full system scan completely for free too. There is a paid option after a certain amount, so it's not completely free, but we'll do a lot of things for free. If you donat wants to pay for the upgrade, I pay for the upgrade because it's just worth my time to run this and not manually remove things every single time I run out of space.

So between this and the external hard drive, I really never worry about space. I just do this about once a month and he just takes care of everything for me. So let me show you what this is going to do here. It's going to show you things that are unneeded junk. You found 6 gigs just like that. So I could go ahead and delete those.

I could review the details on that and see exactly what's going on. A lot of mail attachments. I don't need some system junk, which I wouldn't know how to manually find and there's a little bit in the trashcan, which we manually empty the trashcan. So that's not that important. This is also going to do a whole kind of potential threat protection and speed optimization for me.

You could always do those things on the left side as well. So for example, if I wanted to just take care of system junk, I could come over here, do a scan for that. And I could go ahead and review the details here and this kind of show me everything that is considered system junk and I could either select all of them manually or just let it select all of them and then press clean.

I just loved the graphic representation. This gives me too, and he also shows me the download folder, which I could select and remove things from my download folder that sometimes takes up a bunch of space here of things you've downloaded to your computer. The other thing I like about this is the left side.

There are large and old files. If you go over here, you could do another scan of your entire hard drive and find just basically files that you're not using that are old, that are taken up space. And this is really, really, again, graphic visualization of what I've shown you already. So look at these, all these different files could be just selected here and deleted.

By just pressing remove if you want to remove them. But again, make sure what you're deleting is what you want to delete because you won't get it back and I also use the uninstaller. So this is how I would remove an app that I don't want. So for example, if I want it to remove something, I could just go ahead and select it over here.

So if I want it to remove this app, for example, all selected, this has taken up 3 gigs. It's very useful to show the size and I could press on install here. This is my preferred way of uninstalling because it takes care of everything for you. Debt fast and as far as that other folder, that's taken up a couple of 100 gigabytes on my hard drive.

If I go to space lens here, it's going to scan all my hard drives. So 800 gigabytes and the other folder are just documents that Apple doesn't categorize into documents or movies or photos or applications. So in my case, they are linked inside of my Dropbox. It may be completely different for you, but this gives you a nice representation visually of what's being taken up.

So I could actually jump into the Dropbox folder and see what's going on there. And for some reason, I got a couple of gigs sitting on my hard drive. On the desktop too. So I could go there and I could see, I store a lot of videos in this today, folder here. So I could go ahead and remove those and put them into my external hard drive.

So that's what the other folder is analyzing. So as soon as I remove some of the stories that I have, if I unlink my Dropbox from this computer and just use Dropbox on Dropbox.com, or if I remove these videos from the desktop, it's going to bring down my other folder significantly. So between everything Apple recommends and everything clean my Mac X recommends and takes care of for you and external hard drives, you should be able to save a good amount of space.

I hope you found one of those methods useful and he freed up some space on your Mac and remember the external hard drives are a great way just to get things off the internal hard drive and free up some space. So you never have to worry about it. I haven't bought a dozen of these hard drives for all the videos I've made over the years.

I hope you find this video useful. Please give it a thumbs up and I'll see you next time.

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October 11, 2019Nicole Jones
Free Other Space On Mac

After drinking your first cup of coffee, it is time to start your day with your computer. However, the popping-up message says “Your disk is almost full”. You need to optimize storage to save space on Mac. The dreadful Mac storage is almost full message make you realize that how much stuff stored on your Mac. Well, you may get shocked that “Other” takes up the most storage space.

What is Other on Mac storage? It is easy to understand about “Audio”, “Movies”, “Photos”, “Apps” and “Backups”. But what does “Other” mean in Mac storage? Is there any way to clean up Other storage on Mac? Luckily, you can figure out what is Other storage on Mac and how to remove files from Other storage in details here.

  • Part 1: What You Need to Know about Other Storage on Mac
  • What Is Other on Mac Storage
  • How to Check Other Storage on Mac
  • Part 2: How to Delete Other Storage to Free Up Disk Space on Mac
  • 1. Remove Unwanted Documents to Free Up Other Storage on Mac
  • 2. Delete Cache Files in Other Mac Storage
  • 3. Clear Large Files and Folders to Clean Up Mac Other Files
  • 4. Clean Up App Plugins and Extensions from Other on Mac Storage

Part 1: What You Need to Know about Other Storage on Mac

Let’s solve the first question together. What is Other storage space in Mac OS X? Which category should Other belong to? Just read and get your answer.

What Is Other on Mac Storage

How To Free Other Space On Mac

Generally speaking, all Mac files that cannot be divided into “Apps”, “Photos” and other categories are Other files. These are some data types that are stored in Other storage on Mac.

  • System and temporary files about macOS, like logs, preferences files and more.
  • Cache data from browser, apps, photos, system, etc.
  • Documents in pdf, doc, psd, csv, etc.
  • Personal information.
  • Browser history, cache, downloads and more.
  • Archives and disk images in zips, dmg, iso, tar, etc.
  • App support, app accessories, iCloud files, screen saver, fonts, updates and other file types not recognized by Spotlight.

How to Check Other Storage on Mac

Unfold the “Apple” menu.
Choose “About This Mac”.
Click “Storage” to check the Other storage space on Mac.

Part 2: How to Delete Other Storage to Free Up Disk Space on Mac

After knowing what is Other on Mac storage, you need to take measures to delete Other storage on Mac. It is impossible to entirely get rid of Other on Mac. But you can clean up your Mac Other storage in multiple aspects. It is true that you can find and delete each Other file manually. If you want to get a quicker way to clear Other storage on Mac, Aiseesoft Mac Cleaner is your first choice. You can download the free version from its official site.

1. Remove Unwanted Documents to Free Up Other Storage on Mac

Way 1: Manually Delete Other Documents on Mac

Close all windows. Press “Command” and “F” keys on the desktop.
Click “This Mac” on the top.
From the first drop-down menu, replace “Kind” with “Other”.
Choose “File Size” and “File Extension” in the popping-up “Search Attributes” window.
Input different document file types and file sizes to access large documents.
Check and delete the files you don’t need.

Way 2: Quickly Delete Large and Old Files from Other

Free download, install and run Mac Cleaner.
Click “Cleaner” to access all Mac cleaning tools. Then choose “Large & Old Files” in the main interface.
Click “Scan” to start the scanning process.
Click “View” to review the classified files via “> 100MB”, “5 MB to 10 MB”, “> 1 Year” and “> 30 Days”.
Click “Clean” to delete the selected files and delete Other files on Mac.

2. Delete Cache Files in Other Mac Storage

Way 1: Manually Delete Cache files from Other Data Storage

Choose “Go to Folder” from the “Go” drop-down list in the Finder.

Free Disk Space Macbook Air

Type “~/Library/Caches” and press “Enter” to locate the “Caches” folder.
Make a copy of the Caches folder with your external hard drive if necessary.
Drag and drop all files within the Cache folder to Trash. Empty Trash on Mac.
Repeat the above steps with “/Library/Caches” and “~/Library/Logs” to clean up Other storage on Mac.

Way 2: Quickly Delete User Cache Files to Free Up More Space

Launch Aiseesoft Mac Cleaner.
In the “Cleaner” section, click “System Junk” in the first place.
Click “Scan” to find system cache, application cache and more junk files.
Choose “View” to have a check. You can preview and select the system cache and application cache you want to delete.
Click “Clean” to remove cache files from Other on Mac storage.

3. Clear Large Files and Folders to Clean Up Mac Other Files

Way 1: Manually Delete System and Temporary Files from Other on Mac

Open Finder. Unfold the “Go” list. Then choose “Go To Folder”.
Type “~/Users/User/Library/Application Support/” or “~/Library/Application Support”. Later, click “Go” to go to the destination folder.
Open the certain folder to find and delete useless system files.

Way 2: Quickly Clean System Files and Logs from Other Storage Space

Open Mac Cleaner. Choose “System Junk” in the “Cleaner” section.
Click “Scan” to scan for all system junk files in a short time.
Click “View” to access system cache, application cache, system logs, user logs and localization. You can see how many Other storage those files use.
Space
Select and preview the outdated system files.
Click “Clean” to delete Other on Mac flexibly.

4. Clean Up App Plugins and Extensions from Other on Mac Storage

Way 1: Remove Extensions and Plugins from Safari

Open Safari. Choose “Preferences” from the list.
Click “Extensions” to access all Safari extensions.
Click “Uninstall” to uninstall a Safari extension.

Way 2: Remove Extensions and Plugins from Google Chrome

Run Google Chrome.
Find and click the three-dot “More Tools” on the top right corner.
Choose “Extensions” from its submenu.
Disable any Chrome extension or plugin you do not want to use anymore.

Furthermore, you can also use the built-in app uninstaller, duplicate finder, file manager, unarchiver, file hider, system performance monitor and more here. In a word, you can delete Other on Mac and speed up Mac in clicks. Mac Cleaner is 100% safe to use. You can preview, filter, organize and select any Mac file before cleanup. The whole process will not cause data overwritten. You will never know how fast your Mac computer can be before running Aiseesoft Mac Cleaner. Well, why not free download the program to have a try right now!

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