Missing storage space
Q
My Mac’s running out of disk space. The Storage window shows 130GB taken up by ‘Other’, and I can’t identify what this is. Is it necessary, or can I reclaim the space? byMARIONIVAR
A
Information given by the Storage section of About This Mac was often notoriously unreliable in older versions of macOS. Although it has improved in the last year or two, it often doesn’t give particularly helpful categories, and lumps things together as Other or System Data.
Before you start an intensive housekeeping session to clear away unwanted files, try starting up in Safe mode (with the ⇧ key held), leaving your Mac a couple of minutes, then restarting normally. This clears various caches and can reclaim several GB with little effort on your part.
Another check to make is whether your disk has large old snapshots stored on it. In Monterey, Disk Utility displays those for volumes when enabled in its View menu, but in older versions of macOS you’ll need a third-party utility, such as Carbon Copy Cloner. You can then clean up any unwanted snapshots as they can readily take tens of GB, provided that you’re careful not to remove any Time Machine backups.
If your Mac is still short of free storage space, then you’ll need to clean out old files, for which you’ll find a utility such as GrandPerspective useful to help you identify which of the largest files and folders are the best candidates.