If you have limited storage space on your Mac, you have probably wondered on more than one occasion what the Other space means and how you could reduce it to save some memory. Different factors influence, but we are going to see how to optimize this aspect of the computer as much as possible.
You can see for yourself how much this space is occupying you at the moment by accessing About this Mac in the OS X menu bar. Once inside you should go to the Storage tab, where a bar separated by colors is shown according to the type of files that take up the storage disk space.
What Others Contain in OS X Storage
As you can see for yourself, Others is one of the categories that take up the most space, unless you have numerous movies and songs. Be that as it may if you wonder what kind of files this category contains it is very simple. Others contain all files other than audio, movies, photos, apps, or backups.
These are some types of files that it can contain :
- Documents
- Caches
- Contacts
- Calendar data
- Application modules or extensions
- Media files that Spotlight cannot classify
- Files that Spotlight does not recognize
How to reduce the space occupied by others
If you need to increase the space of your hard disk without having to resort to an external drive, the best thing you can do is erase by yourself elements that you no longer need.
- Delete duplicate or similar files you have on your computer
- Delete the cache of the applications that allow it from the settings of the same
- Compress large files that you don’t use often
- Save to iCloud and download only low resolution/quality versions of photos and music in Photos and iTunes respectively
- Uninstall the apps you don’t use
How to Find and Remove Files from The Other Storage Category On Mac
Step 1. On the desktop, press a combination of Command + F to find files from the other storagecategory on Mac
Step 2. Click on the option This Mac
Step 3. Click on the first dropdown menu field for the next step to remove files from the other storagecategory on mac
Step 4. Select Other
Step 5. Tick File Extension and File Size from the Search Attributes window
Step 6. Review the available items and delete as required to clean up other storage on mac and choose OK
Step 7. Now, click on the dropdown again and choose File size
Step 8. From there, choose whether the file size is equal, less than, greater than, or isn’t similar to the size added in the box beside. Then, add the size. From the results, choose the files and delete.
Step 9. Again, click on the dropdown and this time, choose File extension
Step 10. Add the extension in the box beside and you’ll get the results
Step 11. Choose the files, right click on them, and select Move to Trash
If this process seems tedious, you can always turn to applications that do this process for you. On the one hand, you can use Gemini 2 to find duplicate or similar files on your computer. On the other hand, using CleanMyMac 3 you can do automatic cleaning of unnecessary data that the computer stores in Others.
In any case, to reduce and optimize the space of Others and of the disk in general, the best thing that you can do is to keep the computer clean and tidy, without files that you don’t use and keeping in an external drive everything that you don’t open often.