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When I woke up his morning, I had >80 GB of free space on my hard drive. Over the last four hours, in which I wasn't even around, something filled my hard drive completely. I would attach a screenshot, but there isn't even room to save one.

I'm currently looking at around 210GB of 'other' on my 250GB HD - and I have no idea where it came from. It's always been fairly stable until today.

I am, of course, deleting everything I can afford to, but unless someone knows of something huge I can nuke where 'other' is, I don't think I'll be able to get it down to a manageable size.

I have a Time Machine backup. If I restore to it, will it also contain this huge amount of 'other'? Or is there a better option?

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  • Have you tried rebooting your Mac? I've seen (awful, terrible, no good) applications create monstrous piles of 'temporary' files like this that delete themselves on a reboot. – LessPop_MoreFizz Apr 6 '14 at 23:24
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There are many things that 'other' could be. This Apple KB article details what 'other' space is:

…but basically, there's not only one thing that it could be, or one thing that everyone's suffered from.

Your best bet is probably to run something like Daisy Disk or similar to find large files to delete. Alternatively, use Finder and search for large files sorted by Date Modified so that you can see recent files that might be taking up large quantities of space.

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I recommend checking out a tool (there are many others) such as DaisyDisk which easily allows you to drill down and find space hogs. The trial version should do the job in a hurry.

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  • There is also a free utility called Disk Inventory X which will do essentially the same thing. – Hefewe1zen Apr 7 '14 at 0:46
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Where do you see that "other"?

Free some space if you can and use DiskWave to check exactly where the files are.

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