To find and remove large and unneeded documents from Other Storage manually: Soon your Other documents can start to get out of hand. And that’s before you start adding images, downloading ebooks, and creating big presentations. You might not think that pure text documents take up a lot of space, but you may be surprised at the size of some. Remove documents from Other Storage space We’re going to walk you through deleting useless documents, junk system files, system slowing cache files, old backups, and all sorts of other junk.
Mac other files how to#
We’re now going to look at each of the six types of Other files and show you how to clean up your Mac.
You can’t entirely get rid of Other on Mac, but you can reduce how much storage space it takes up. Now, we'll see what's possible to delete. See those small folders? This is where your “Other” storage is. Messing up a few folders here may break your Mac. This part of your Mac is hidden from view for a reason. This is where your macOS keeps application components, widgets, and various cache archives. To show you where it is, let’s look at your Library. This is the only place where on your Mac, it shows the size of your apps, books, and documents in gigabytes. Is your disk approaching full capacity? Now, click “Manage.” The sidebar to the left is really enlightening. What’s this? A song? An unknown archive? Why on Earth does it weigh 200 MB? How to check Mac disk space usageĪ few years back, Apple introduced “Optimized Storage,” a great feature for finding out how your disk space is structured. Everything else that doesn’t fit into the main macOS categories.Cache files like user cache, browser cache, and system cache.Simply, Other storage on Mac consists of files that do not easily fall into the clearer category labels like "Audio." The types of "Other" files would include: So let’s figure out what Other Storage is and how to remove Other from your Mac. That’s why you have to learn to check the storage on Mac properly. This category contains junk files as well as important ones. On recent macOS versions, this storage category is labeled “other volumes in container.” Which, of course, doesn’t make it any less cryptic. This is what creates the cryptic category of “Other” storage on Mac. We generate more and more content on our devices and use apps that are bursting with cache files. The promised 1 TB of storage - which is the capacity of the MacBook Air 2020 - will still be not enough for many. MacBook storage issue is still a relevant one in 2021.
Mac other files manual#
For manual solutions, see our ideas below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. You can even build an interactive map of your drive to find items that waste space. This app is notarized by Apple on macOS Big Sur. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly regain control of your storage.