What is Other Storage on Mac and How to Remove It?

When looking onto your Mac’s hard drive you will come to know, how much of your storage space has been occupied. This will give you an idea of what is consuming most of your mac space. In the hard drive content, you will find several labels, such as Albums, videos, apps, and backups but along with these labels comes content folder labeled as ‘Others’. This is where the confusion starts. 

 What other Storage is and how to remove Other from your Mac.

Though every content is categorized, why the other id displayed? Why it’s consuming so much space? How to remove it? If these are your question you have come to the right place. Keep reading for your answers.

It is very confusing to don’t know what data is occupying your computer’s storage space. It’s more irritating when your laptop storage is full and you don’t know what to delete and how.

In this article, we will talk about what is the other data in your Mac’s hard drive. Also how to remove it so that you can have some extra space on your Mac storage. If you have not checked the storage space yet here is how you can check Mac’s data storage.

Follow the step below stops:

How to view the storage space on your Mac

Concerned with how much storage space you have remaining on your Mac computer? The first thing to do is to go through the storage of your Mac and how much of each category is consuming the space including Other.

Here is how you can go through the storage contents on your Mac. 

• Step 1: Tap on your desktop or go to the Finder icon from the Dock.
• Step 2: Tap on the Apple menu icon in the upper left corner of the screen.
• Step 3: Go to About This Mac.
• Step 4: Choose Storage.

Step 5: You will see the list of labels as following: Apps, Movies, Photos, Audio, Backups, and that, undescriptive label ‘Other’.

What is ‘Other’ Storage on Mac?

Your Mac’s OS uses ‘Other’ folder for storing broad files content on the hard disk. Basically, it’s a mixture of many things that you create or install on your Mac. Below is the list of files that houses in the other folder.

• Several Documents type such PDF, .psd, .doc, etc created by you will be saved in other.
• macOS system files and also temporary files can be found in Others.
• Different kind of cache files your browser download get saved in other such as user cache, browser cache, and system cache.
• Media files of apps and other things are included in ”Other”
• Archived files like .zip and .dmg along with Disk images.
• App plugins from browsers like Safari and Firefox. Also, browser extensions that you have installed occupy space in Others.
• Anything or everything that doesn’t come in the main macOS categories fall in the other category. 

The amount of space varies with different users, some users stores merely 15 GB to 20 GB content while some end up having 80 to 90 GB of space of their hard drive. The volume of space occupied in your Mac depends on the number of things like third-party apps, the number of documents you create and many things which you don’t even require. Removing these files from your computer, you can free off a lot of space on the hard drive. More space on the computer leads to better performing OS and no lagging.

How to delete Other Storage on Mac

Now when you know what ‘other’ folder contains, it’s time to delete all the unnecessary files. Note that you can not completely empty the other folder as it saves some default data but you can clear unnecessary junk for sure and we will tell you how. Here we will discuss how we will clear off different content one by one. So let’s get started.

1. Remove unnecessary documents from Other

Do you think document files do not occupy much space on your computer? Actually, it does, there are several pages and .csv files higher on size. Along with the page there comes images, ebooks, and presentation which put on the extra weight in the Other folder.

Here is how you to search and then delete unnecessary documents from Other Storage manually: 

• Step 1: From your desktop press Command + F.
• Step 2: Select This Mac.
• Step 3: A dropdown menu will appear, now go to field option and select Other.
• Step 4: From the Search Attributes window tick File Size and File Extension.
• Step 5: Now you can input different document file types (.pdf, .pages, etc.) and file sizes to find large documents.
• Step 6: Review the items and then delete as needed.

  2. How to remove cached files

If you search a lot of things or own numerous websites on your browser on a regular basis, you must have saved up a lot of cache data. To reduce the load time of websites and application some files and data gets saved onto your computer known as cached data. But apart from that reducing load time, cache data also consume lots of your storage space.

So if you want to create some free space on your Mac, you can remove unnecessary cache data which can include caches of web browser,  Apple Music streams, and photo previews.

Also while deleting cache make sure you remove unnecessary junk and not something that is current and important. The best thing to do is remove cache of old apps which are no longer used. 

Here is how you can remove cache files:

• Step1: Click on your desktop or select the Finder icon from the Dock.
• Step 2: Select the Go menu in the upper left corner of the screen.
• Step 3: Click on Go to Folder.
• Step 4: Type ~/Library/caches into the text box. A list of caches from active apps will appear on your desktop.
• Step 5: Select the app folder you wish to remove the cache from.
• Step 6: Right-click on the app folder.
• Step 7: Select Move to Trash.

   3. Remove temporary files

Whenever you turn on your Mac, the OS keeps on making piles of system files and logs. These files are required at some point but they soon get outrated and gets saved on your computer for no use. These files are temporary files as they are required for a temporary time. It’s a bit complicated to remove these temporary files, but it’s a good practice to delete stuff which you no longer use. 

The first thing to do when deleting temporary files is to visit the library folder. Visit your library folder to see where are most of your temporary files. For this go to following 

• Step 1: Select Go from the menu bar
• Step 2: Select the ‘go-to folder’ at the bottom.
• Step 3: Pop message showcasing Users/User/Library/Application Support/ will appear, press OK.
• Step 4: In this folder, you will see all your applications and some will reveal a lot of space being taken up. For example, you may have saved gigabytes worth data of old iOS backups in /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup.

It’s better to delete it manually and it can be easily done through CleanMyMac X. Here’s how to easily remove system files from Other Storage:

• Step 1: Go to System Junk in CleanMyMac.
• Step 2: Tap the Scan button.
• Step 3: Now tap on the Clean tab.

This process will clear of junks leaving a good amount of free space for you. You will note that that OS X other storage tab has been cleared off in a good amount of gigabytes.

4. Remove Extensions and plugins which are no longer used 

Though all the information gets stored in the folder labeled as App, the add-ons are stored falls on the Other category. All the plugins and extensions you use on your Mac is also saved in Mac storage. They don’t weigh much in size however you should not take this fact as granted and work towards creating space in your mac by deleting all sort of unnecessary junk. 

These extensions can also create unnecessary trouble in your Mac. So to avoid such circumstances remove extensions that remain unused and save some space. It is difficult to have remembered all browser extension. We get you and also have the solution, follow the steps below to remove extensions from Safari, Chrome and Firefox respectively.

Note that if you are not completely sure what plugin function don’t remove yet. First, disable the extension and see everything works normally, if any of your apps are affected you can enable the extension back. Also, note that Chrome extensions can’t be deleted automatically. But if you’d like to get rid of them, we’ll list these extensions for you and tell how to do that manually.

Remove extensions from Safari:

• Step 1: Open Safari browser.
• Step 2: Select Preferences.
• Step 3: Click on the Extensions tab.
• Step 4: Now choose the extension you do not use, to remove it click on uninstall.

Remove extensions from Chrome browser:

• Step #1: Open Chrome browser.
• Step #2: Tap on the three-dot icon in the top-right corner.
• Step #3: Select tools from the list and go to Extensions.
• Step #4: Disable or remove extension as per your preference.

Remove extensions from Firefox:

• Step 1  Open Mozilla Firefox browser.
• Step 2: Tap on the top-right corner burger menu.
• Step 3: Choose Add-ons.
• Step 4: From the Extensions and Plugins tabs disable and remove whatever you want. 

  

5. How to Remove  backups in iTunes

If you tend to get new iOS devices fairly regularly, you may have unnecessary device backups stored on your computer via iTunes. Backups take up 4-5GB each, on average; there’s no need to hold on to older device backups if you no longer have the device or have it stored in iCloud.

6. Third-party software that can help

Although you don’t compulsory need third-party tools to remove other folder content but these tools can simplify your task. They are easy to use tools that regularly cleans up your Mac removing unnecessary junk.

Here are tools you can rely on for cleaning up your Mac computer:

• CleanMyMac 3
  
  
• DaisyDisk
  
  
• Cocktail
  
  
• Onyx
  

That’s it, folks, you don’t have to worry about the storage consumption anymore. You can easily clear off junk files residing in your device with the help of these guidelines. If you have any queries related to the process connect with us via the comment section mention below.

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