"Other" Is infesting My Hard Drives

[theelysium]

All of my Macs are being infested with "Other" data using up the hard drives. I have gone through user account(s) and all of their folders adding up how much data is being used by each user, etc. None of them seem to have the ""other" data in their home directories.

"Other" is growing and causing some of my machines to run out of disk space. The "other" data is so invasive I have some machines with user folders at about 100GBs out of 500GBs and the "other" is filling the rest of the space.

I am not sure what to do. I need my disc space obviously, but I can't figure out how to delete the "other".

Some people say the "other" is an anomaly and it is actually in a user folder, but I have added up data through user folders and found them to be pretty close or accurate to the audio, movie, files, apps, etc data types. It appears that "other" is some data from the system it's self...

I don't know any ideas?

 

[mrapplegate]

A search of the forum showed a great link by GGJstudios

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/14103154/

Shown here.

 

[theelysium]

I did search nothing came up for me...

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My issue is beyond those explanations, which I've also found on different websites.

 

[theSeb]

I did search nothing came up for me...

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My issue is beyond those explanations, which I've also found on different websites.

I don't believe that you have actually read through my post that is linked above. If you had, then you would understand what the other category is. Are you using TM for back ups? Have you checked the Volumes folder?

Other is everything that spotlight does not recognise as one of the named categories. It could be anything from system files to document revisions (versions) to movie files that spotlight does not think are movies (e.g Mkv files). The storage tab uses the spotlight index so it's not always a useful graphic to look at.

How did you add up what is on your hard drives? Did you use finder? Did you enable hidden files and include them?

Ahh, finally back in front of a computer. I wasn't going to type all of this on an iPhone

Open Terminal (Applications --> Utilities) and type in the following lines. Make sure to wait for the command to finish and then save the output. Once you're done, paste it here so we can check it out.

This to check the contents of your startup drive

sudo du -d1 -h /

Now we will check if nothing has gone wrong in Volumes (sometimes an app can continue writing if you eject an external drive in the middle of an operation)

cd /Volumes
ls -al

Now let's check out the space taken by your user account

cd ~
sudo du -d1 -h

Now we need to check your two other drives. You most likely won't even need sudo here, but let's include it just in case. I am assuming that your drives are still called FCPX and Video.

sudo du -d1 -h /Volumes/FCPX

sudo du -d1 -h /Volumes/Video

 

[theelysium]

Excuse u

Don't be arrogant.

I have read through it, its info I already knew.

Thanks for being a genius.