06 Feb What is Other on Mac Storage and How to Clean it Up

No one wants to get stuck with speed issues on their Mac. But the problem is many times when you think you’ve already dumped plenty of clutter into the trash icon of your Mac, you still keep seeing an error message saying, Your startup disk is full.

You certainly don’t want to see this error message again. So, what can you do now? With all the prominent documents, movies, media, apps, and other data deleted, what else can you do away with?

Here’s an easy solution. Clean up the Other storage on your Mac’s disk to speed up the system again. You can use Mac Optimizer Pro to clean up all storage disks including Other storage to conveniently and safely do this task. Alternatively, you can also clear Other storage space on your Mac by yourself, i.e. manually. Here’s the complete tutorial.

What is Other Storage on Mac?

Simply put, Other storage on your Mac is nothing but the files and data that do not straightforwardly fall into a prominent category, viz. music, audio, video, apps, mail, document, etc. To have more understanding, see the system cache, plugins, extensions, log entries, cache, voice files, .dmg and .zip drive images, and some others.

This storage takes up much space on your Mac and you can free up a large space by doing away with this data.

How to Clear Other Storage on Mac

Delete Documents on Other Disk Space

When you don’t clean up your Documents folder frequently, it starts to flood with small to heavy files ultimately creating huge junk on your Mac. You can free up Other disk space by removing this junk in this way:

• When on your Mac’s desktop, press Command + F on the keyboard
• Select This Mac
• When the drop-down menu appears, click on the first option from the top
• Click Other
• Select File Size and File Extension on the Search Attributes window
• Enter different document extensions such as .pages, .csv, .pdf, etc. and see which file sizes to get rid of
• Remove the ones not needed

Remove Temporary Files in Other Disk

The log entries that Mac keeps on creating frequently are the ones that get stored in the Other storage. When they are too many in number, your Mac starts to slow down. You can delete these temporary files to free up Other disk space on your Mac.

• Got to Finder > Go > Go to Folder
• Enter ~/Library
• Choose the Application Support folder
• Check and remove the files you want

Remove Cache in the Other Storage

Caches are the files that your system generates when you open an app, do a task, visit a website, etc. These files make it easy and fast for you to reload a page or software. However, this data keeps piling up and it makes the performance of your Mac poor. Here’s how to clear up cache on your Mac:

• Open Finder > Go > Go To Folder.
• Enter ~/Library/Caches
• Hit Go
• Choose your desired files inside the folder
• Drag them to Trash
• Empty Trash

Delete Extensions and Plugins in Other Disk

These plugins and extensions take up space on your disk and make the system slow. Here, we give a tutorial to delete this data from different browsers.

Delete Extensions in Chrome

• Go to the three-dot button
• Select More Tools > Extensions
• Deactivate the ones you want

Delete Extensions in Safari

• Select Preferences
• Go to Extensions
• Un-tick Enable
• Hit Uninstall to remove the ones you want

Delete Extensions in Firefox

• Go to the burger menu
• Select Add-ons
• Go to plugins and extensions tabs one by one and deactivate/remove the ones you want

Remove Disk Archives and Images in Other Storage

You can free up Other storage by deleting unnecessary .dmg and .zip files. Here’s how you can do it using Spotlight

• Launch Finder and enter DMG/ZIP in the given field
• Click This Mac
• Review the items by size and delete the ones you don’t want

Conclusion

You can save your time by automatically cleaning up the Other storage on your Mac by using Mac Optimizer Pro. It runs in the background and keeps removing all the faulty items that slow down your Mac.