How to Clean the 'Other Storage' on Mac

Much like your mobile phone, your Mac also has a part of its storage that is simply labelled as "Other Storage". In some cases, both on mobile phones and on a Mac computer, you will find that this mysterious category takes up quite a bit of your available storage space.

In this article we will explain what exactly this mysterious storage space has in it and how to clean its contents and regain disk space.

In brief, "Other Storage" is that fraction of your drive space that contains files that don't fall into one of the other categories that Apple has pre-defined for your drive contents. If a file does not meet the requirements to show up under Documents, Photos, Movies, Apps or Audio, chances are it will end up listed under "Other Storage".

This description may make it seem like only non-essential files are kept there, but this is not always the case. Other Storage on a Mac will contain files that can be safely deleted, such as temporary files and cache files, but it also contains MacOS folders, any archive files that will contain many other files in them, such as .iso or .zip files, as well as user data and miscellaneous files such as fonts and hidden files.

There are software applications that may allow you to automatically clear out non-essential files kept in "Other Storage", but if you want to do this manually, you should be very careful what you delete. The majority of "Other Storage" files are kept in the Library folder on your Mac, which will be hidden under default settings. This is a precautionary measure, put in place to ensure that users don't accidentally delete files that are essential for keeping the system or specific apps running smoothly.

If you are looking for a safe and relatively sizable free disk space boost when manually cleaning "Other Files" on your system, your best bet is probably the Cache folder.

To navigate to it, do the following:

  1. Open Finder, then click Go -> Go to Folder.
  2. In the input box, enter ~/Library/Caches and click Go.
  3. Once inside the Caches folder, open each individual application’s cache folder and delete the files found inside it.

Bear in mind that it is not advisable to delete the top-level folders found in the Caches folder, as this may cause app instability and unexpected crashes. If you are doing any cleaning, make sure to first enter each directory and only delete the files found inside it.

Other chunky files that will show up as "Other Storage" include downloaded installers. You can safely delete the .dmg or .pkg install packages of apps you already installed. To do that, navigate to your Downloads folder and delete the packages you previously downloaded and already installed.

 

While there are other files you may be able to manually delete from your "Other Storage", they are negligible in size and hunting them down and deleting them will probably free up as much space as deleting one or two songs you downloaded from iTunes and the trouble is usually not worth it, in the grand scheme of things.

May 12, 2021
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