What is the "other" that is suddenly taking up so much space on my hard drive?

How do I find what is the "other" listed on my hard drive and clean it up?  Seems to be taking almost 80gb's of space now.  Also on my iPhone and iPad, although much less space is being taken.

read "more like this".

Similar Messages

  • How do i find out what is taking up so much space on my hard drive

    Hi,
    My hard drive has a capacity of 27GB abd i only have 3GB available. How can i find out what is taking up so much space?

    Look at these links.
    Where did my disk space go?
    http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum38&Number=770243
    Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk
    http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html
    Increase HD Free Space
    http://macosx.com/forums/howto-faqs/275191-how-easily-increase-hd free-space-laptop.html
    How to free up my disk space
    http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html
     Cheers, Tom

  • Music Taking Up too Much Space on my hard drive...

    Need some assistance... Have download approx. 30g. of Music Files on my 60 g. 5th. Generation iPod. At the same time I now have 30 g. of back-up files on my laptop hard drive....The music files are now taking up too much memory. I bought an 80 g. external hard drive and have copied all my music files onto it... (Accidentally deleted my downloaded music files last year off of my laptop. An expensive lesson!!! So now I download all music on a seperate external hard drive... Can I delete the existing music files off of my laptop, without losing all the stored music on my Ipod when I reconnect with my library on iTunes? I'd just like to safely remove music files from my laptops hard drive without accidentally deleting music already stored on my ipod! Need the memory on my laptop hard drive for other purposes... Anyone out there that can help me with this? Thanks!!!
    iPod Video   Windows XP  

    Make sure in edit>preferences>advanced that you itunes points to its new loaction.
    Also make sure that itune has copy music into new folder, and organise folder checks ticked to the on position.
    Consolidate your library in itunes.
    Then go through an double check each folder before deleting it from original location.
    This will "copy" music and organise all your music into one location aswell as build Library.
    You can add any folder that is missed as you check everything off.
    It will not delete anything so you will need to manually delete as it is shifted.
    Alternatively you can copy everything in exporer to the desired location & import entire folder into library. Once done, consilidate library, check for dublicates.

  • What is taking up so much space on my hard drive? says I have 500gb of 'other'

    I work alot with video / photography / music, but in the 'about this mac' section it only says that I have about 80gb of each on my hard drive. However, it also says that I have 500GB of other and I am unaware of what this is, and how I can get rid of it.
    Anybody have advice?

    Try reindexing the hard drive for Spotlight according to this Apple document: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support.  Reboot and check again.

  • How do I clear the "other" from my phone taking up so much space

    How do I clear the over 3 GB of stuff from the "other" on my iPhone 4S? I am constantly getting messages telling me I can't take a pic bc I don't have enough space and I may only have 100 pic mixtures on my phone.

    look to the right ---------> at more like this.  Look for the green checkmark.

  • HT1349 Due to backing up my itunes on an external 1 terrabite hard drive, I now have duplicates of the same song in my library.  Anyone know how to run something to remove duplicates?  It's taking up too much space on my hard drive.

    Is there something I can run to remove duplicate songs from my itunes library.  This occurred when I backed my itunes library up on an external hard drive, now I have multiple duplicates of the same songs.  HELP!

    I cannot find this 300GB "Backup" in the Finder, only in the Storage info when I check "About This Mac".
    You are probably using Time Machine to backup your MacBook Pro, right? Then the additional 300 GB could be local Time Machine snapshots.  Time Machine will write the hourly backups to the free space on your hard disk, if the backup drive is temporarily not connected. You do not see these local backups in the Finder, and MacOS will delete them, when you make a regular backup to Time Machine, or when you need the space for other data.
    See Pondini's page for more explanation:   What are Local Snapshots?   http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
    I have restarted my computer, but the information remains the same. How do I reclaim the use of the 300GB? Why is it showing up as "Backups" when it used to indicate "Photos"? Are my photos safe on the external drive?
    You have tested the library on the external drive, and so your photos are save there.  
    The local TimeMachine snapshot probably now contains a backup of the moved library.  Try, if connecting your Time Machine drive will reduce the size of your local Time Machine snapshots.

  • HELP with what is taking up so much space on my hard drive?

    I have a 30g hard drive and it only has 7.92g left of space on it and I have deleted everything but a few extra applications and the onces OSX came with.
    this is a dual boot system so that means It came with 0s9 as well. Please can anyone direct me on how to figure this out?
    here are some specs.
    powerbook g4 titanium
    667mhz 1mb l3 cache
    OS X 10.4.11
    512mb SDRAM

    You could also try running the maintenance (cron) scripts. These often don't get run on laptops and will clear out various cache and log files, freeing up disk space. You can run all three scripts in the terminal by typing:
    sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
    You will likely be prompted to enter your password. They can take some time to complete (you can monitor progress using Activity Monitory). If you don't want to mess with the terminal, search around for a utility that will run the scripts (some are free, some are not).

  • Why is Preview taking up so much space on my hard drive when saving changes to a PDF file?

    I am working with a large PDF file (3.3GB) in Preview and am highlighting and adding notes to the contents. Every so often, Preview auto-saves the document, but while it's doing that it takes up a HUGE amount of space on my harddrive! Last time it tried, I went from having 4GB of space to 800MB and recieved a message saying I was almost out of disk space so I force closed the file. I am also pretty sure that I had closer to 15GB of space before I started using this file and since then it has dropped to only 3.3GB. Is there some sort of Preview cache? If so, how do I delete it?
    I've tried searching my harddrive for large files and didn't find anything larger than 1GB that I didn't recognize.

    read "more like this".

  • How do I remove/delete the loops I've downloaded?  I don't use them and they are taking up too much space on my hard drive.

    I wanted to see what was in the loops folders but now will never use them and I need the space. 

    Yes, I am logged in as the administrator.  When I drag a loop to the trash it does nothing.  The trash doesn't recoginize the item as trash and doesn't pop up and say trash like it does when I drag items from other programs to the trash.

  • What's the easiest way to add storage to a mac mini. (1TB hard drive but only 32G of real storage). External device, internal or partitioning?

    What's the easiest way to add storage to a mac mini. (1TB hard drive but only 32G of real storage). External device, internal or is there some way to partition? I tried doing so but received a message that there wasn't enough free space to partition. Seems like a 1TB drive should have more storage than my Ipad

    Its worth confirming what free space you have on your drive: 
    go to:   Apple Menu > About this Mac >  More Info > Storage
    The bar chart shows how much free space there is on the drive:
    Please realise that partitioning does not create extra space so this wont help you.
    If your free space is less than 20 % you should get extra storage with an external USB or Firewire drive, any make or model will work.

  • What's the best approach/program for finding and eliminating duplicate photos on my hard drive?

    What's the best approach/program for finding and eliminating duplicate photos on my hard drive? I have a "somewhat" older version of iPhoto (5.0.4), and it doesn't seem to offer anything like that except during the importing phase of syncing my phone...

    I wonder, is there room to transfer them to your phone, & then back to filter them?

  • Why is the "other" on my iphone take up so much space?

    Why is the "other" on my iphone take up so much space?

    "Other" contains objects that are not categorized elsewhere.  It includes, for example, iOS, mail messages, and working space.
    If "Other" is more than about 1.5 gigabytes, that would be considered a lot of space.  That is often caused by corrupt app(s).
    You can shrink "Other" by restoring your iPhone using iTunes.  Plug your iPhone in, let it sync, then choose "Restore" from your iPhone's summary page in iTunes.  You can try restoring from the backup, but that may not work.  If not, restore as new and selectively sync apps back.

  • My 'backup' is taking up a huge space on my hard drive but I have an external hard drive for my back ups - how do i get rid of this?

    Please can you help - I have recently added an external hard drive to my Macbook so it can be used as a back up and storage to save space on my hard drive.  I have deleted videos and photos from my hard drive but they are being replaced with 'backup'
    how do i get rid of this ?
    thanks

    Welcome to Apple Support Communities
    Time Machine makes local snapshots in all portable Macs with Lion or Mountain Lion. They are made in the internal drive and they are removed when your hard disk gets full, so you don't have to worry about it.
    If you want to delete them, turn off Time Machine and turn it on every time you want to make a backup. You can also turn them off manually without having to turn off Time Machine, or you can delete those local snapshots > http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

  • Memory issues...what is the "Other" that is taking up so much space?

    I have a 4 Gig IPhone...and have 303mb of music, 1.3 gigs of video, 25.2 mb of photos, and then there is the 1.61 GB of "Other" ???...what is taking up all this space ? any idea...or anyone else notice that goin on with there Iphone ???...Large amounts of space being taken up by "Other" ???
    IMac G5, 17 Inch, rev B & MacBook 2GHz, 2 gb, white, Iphone 4GB   Mac OS X (10.4.1)  

    I had the exact same issue. I scoured the forums and the manuals. I had 404 meg of other. After i removed all my mp3's it went to 420. Wierd
    So i did a restore. Then I had 14.4.
    I opened Google maps and it went to 15.5.
    Yesterday I did some mapping with google as well. again the size went up.
    My theory is that Google maps caches the maps you use.
    However there is no way to clear the google cache.
    I also cleared safari cache and that had no affect.
    Since then I have been monitoring the other usage. It is still on a steady upward pace. I hope I dont have to reload to reclaim space again.
    Maybe this is something they will fix.
    Tom

  • Why is my internal memory so full? How can I find out what is the "other" that is taking up so much space?

    I'm not very tech-savvy. My iPhone is backed up on my computer and all my photos are in my computer. I'm going to send it away to have the screen fixed and the people from AppleCare recommended to back it up just in case. So, I am going to backup my computer for the first time since I bought it in mid 2011. I go see how much space I need and I see that I only have 15 GB of memory space left and this huge space being used up by "Other". I don't know if its because I updated it to Mavericks. How can I see what that is? Also, I've never downloaded movies so I don't know why that is also there. Please help ASAP!
    I added a photo.

    "Other" is everything that isn't in one of the other categories. For instance, it includes all your user documents that are not movie, audio, or photo files.
    Regardless of that, you need to use an external drive at least large enough to backup your entire user folder (the one with a House icon). Better is to get one at least as large as your built-in drive & use something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to clone the whole built-in drive to it.

Maybe you are looking for