When checking the status of storage on your system, you may notice the category 'Other' occupies a great deal of space.įiles under this section may seem redundant, not important, and can be deleted, but we recommend that you read through this article before removing any files. Mac users often become aware of disk space when a message stating that 'there is not enough free space' appears when downloading files from the Internet. You can show hidden files with defaults write AppleShowAllFiles -bool true killall Finder.What is 'Other' on Your Mac's Storage and How to Remove or Clear It?Įven basic information can seem confusing at first, especially with regard to Mac hard drive categories. It contained about 2GB of old docset files.Ī good way to find large files is to sort files by size in list view after checking calculate all sizes in the view options. Library/Developer/ wasn't removed when I installed Xcode 4.3. If hibernatemode is 3, /var/vm/sleepimage takes up the same amount of disk space as the amount of RAM you have. Safari saves the contents of websites and plain text files to ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/.

defaults write DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2 disables saving the thumbnails. ~/Library/Caches//Webpage Previews/ was about 700 GB on my installation of 10.7. ~/Library/Autosave Information/ can contain old unsaved documents. du -sm /private/var/folders/*/*/*/*/ | sort -rn sorts the folders by size. private/var/folders/ can contain partially downloaded files or files for applications that have been removed. They are deleted automatically when you start running out of disk space though. When a backup volume is not mounted, Time Machine has saved hourly snapshots to /Volumes/MobileBackups/ on laptops since 10.7.

Clean mac files