What Is Other On Your Mac Storage

This section houses a mix of junk and important files.

What is other on your mac storage.

In the simplest of terms the other category is a combination of files that are not recognized as one of the other file types. Select the apple menu icon in the upper left corner of the screen. Eventually you will see a bar chart showing what types of files are taking up space on your mac similar to this image. Your mac breaks down its storage categories as follows.

Cache files like user cache browser cache and system cache. Apps movies photos audio backups and that annoying undescriptive category other. Powerpoints zip rar files mail messages and so forth. But for many users particularly those with multiple hard drives the other category is comically large.

What is other on mac storage. Documents like pdf psd doc etc. You need that stuff and is again why we caution you not to simply clear out everything in your library that doesn t immediately resonate. Macos system and temporary files.

In our case yellow is photos red is apps light blue is messages purple is. Specifically other files include the contents of the system and library folders because spotlight won t report on them by default non media documents such as text files and email archives. Click on about this mac. Most files in other storage are located in the hidden library folder which apple uses to prevent the deletion of important files that could cause problems with applications or system operations.

The one thing to remember about other storage on mac is it s not always going to vanish. Your mac stores all kinds of things there like application support and font files. What is other on mac storage. Your mac is screaming fast and you have storage to spare.

Simply other storage on mac consists of files that do not easily fall into the clearer category labels like audio the types of other files would include. The other category is a combination of files that are not recognized as one of the other file types music apps etc this category may include system files and caches apps extensions user logs documents e g. When you started your machine for the first time you might have been confident that you would never fill up all of those gigabytes. Where is other storage on a mac.

Just like the other on iphone and ipad it is home to several files cached data and more.