If your iPhone, iPad, or Mac storage is full, you might start to wonder what this “Other” category is that keeps using your space. “Other” or “System” can bloat to fill up your entire device, but we can get rid of it. Downloads Folder. The Downloads folder is the default location on Mac that stores all the content. Find Duplicate Files Mac. The quickest way to free up space on your Mac is to automatically remove files that you don’t need. Without realizing it, you can accumulate gigabytes worth of duplicate files and folders on your computer. How to Clean Other Storage on Mac. You can’t remove all the Other storage on Mac because some files are essential for keeping the system running smoothly, but you can reduce the storage space it takes up. You can delete unnecessary files using a Mac cleanup tool or manually.
System cleanup in one click
Checking your storage on Mac isn't difficult – but managing it can be. One of the more curious storage compartments is the 'other' storage on Mac, which sounds like a catch-all for files that can't be labeled properly.
And that's sort of true! But the other volumes in container can get full, and reduce the Mac storage Other space for your Mac. And keep in mind there's no 'how to get rid of other on Mac' option; the partition isn't there to delete totally. Here we'll show you how to check your other space, and offer guidance on managing it.
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How to Check Storage on Mac
This will be quick! Just follow these directions:
- Click the Apple logo on the top left of the menu bar
- Select 'About This Mac'
- Choose 'Storage'
And there you go! That's the simple way to check the storage available on your Mac. Now, do you see that 'Manage…' button on the right-hand side of the window? Click it!
Depending on how you use your Mac and what apps you run, that 'other' category could be taking up quite a bit of space, and you could free it up very easily — potentially saving yourself from having to buy additional storage.
View and Manage the Other space on Mac
The next window you arrive at shows how Apple manages your system memory. In macOS Sierra, Apple added a default feature named 'Optimize' that helps balance the load between cloud storage and on-device memory use. As you can see in the window (below), 'System' and 'Other' are greyed-out.
This is because the other space is tricky to manage, and required digging into the Library on your Mac. As we cautioned in our article on deleting apps from your Mac, foraging through Library is a tad frightening, so proceed with caution.
But what is other on Mac? In essence, it's caches, plug-ins, and documents macOS wants to keep around. Here's how to open Library, so we can start to discover what 'other' is on Mac:
- Open Finder
- Select 'Go' from menu
- Hold down 'option' key on keyboard; you should see a new option for 'Library'
- While holding down the option key, select 'Library'
You'll see a Library folder in the list. Click it to see all your apps and associated files. There are also folders with names like 'Caches.'
We can't caution you enough: if you're not sure what it is you're looking for, don't delete it – and remember you can't delete Other on Mac entirely. There's a reason Apple hides the Library; small changes can have deep, lasting effects.
But, if you know what needs deleting, this is where you'll find it. If you're positive an app's files or plugins need to go, this is where you'll find them. Simply right-click the folder or file you want gone, and select 'move to trash.' Then empty the trash can, and you're done. This is how you remove files from the Other storage category. Check info about how to recover files from a hard drive on Mac.
But that's scary stuff. We have a better way
The Best Way to Reduce Other Storage on Mac
Apple's Optimize service is great for Macs with tons of on-board storage, mostly because those machines need very little interaction when it comes to managing files and storage space.
The best option is to find a file manager you can control. ForkLift is a really solid option that brands itself as a replacement for Finder – and it's not wrong. You can connect multiple servers (FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, AFP, WebDAV, SMB, and NFS), and archive unnecessary files or folders. Like Finder, it has a preview for files you're accessing, and also lets you compare files so you can delete duplicates as needed.
A much more robust method is with CleanMyMacX. This app is almost a must-have for any Mac owner. It managed files, folders, apps, extensions, updates, mail attachments, and the trash bin. But it's core function is to make sure your Mac is optimized, and it does an amazing job.
Reduce storage with CMM X
Install CleanMyMac X and forget about manual storage cleaning. The app wipes away all junk from your Mac in seconds.
With CleanMyMacX, all you have to do is activate its Smart Scan feature. It discovers unnecessary files for you, and optimizes your Mac for speedier performance. It even makes sure your Mac has no malware!
Trusting CleanMyMacX to do its job correctly is never a question, but you can dig deeper if you like. Once a smart scan is complete, you can select 'review details' under the Cleanup task before you select 'run.' In this details log, you'll see two main categories: system junk, and trash bins.
System Junk is where those pesky cache files are, along with log files. You can choose 'show' to see which caches CleanMyMacX is getting rid of, too.
Conclusion
The one thing to remember about other storage on Mac is it's not always going to vanish. Your Mac stores all kinds of things there, like application support and font files. You need that stuff – and is again why we caution you not to simply clear out everything in your Library that doesn't immediately resonate.
But you don't always need caches, and cleaning your files manually can take a long time. When you're ready to clear 'Other' on Mac, it's almost always because you want it to run smoother, or stay running at optimal performance levels.
This is why we advocate for apps like ForkLift and CleanMyMacX. Even if you want the more manual controls ForkLift offers, its ease of use makes storage management faster and easier.
We think most will find value in CleanMyMacX, too. Its simple one-click optimization makes system maintenance a breeze!
Best of all, both ForkLift and CleanMyMacX are available free as part of a seven day trial of Setapp. In addition to these apps, you get access to dozens of other handy macOS apps!
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.
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.
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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