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How to Clean Other Volumes in Container? Need to Free Up Space

Seeing 'Other Volumes' in Storage and Disk Utility but don't know what it means, 'Other Volumes' occupies tens of, or even hundreds of gigabytes of hard drive space, thus, can I delete/clean Other Volumes in a Mac and how?

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Jessica Shee

Jessica Shee

Answered on Tuesday, December 3, 2024

'Other Volumes' appears in Storage and Disk Utility after upgrading to macOS High Sierra, and some Mac users found that it takes up a large part of the hard drive space, up to hundreds of gigabytes, shrinking the available space for other volumes.

Other Volumes are invisible volumes to users but are required by macOS to function properly. It typically contains:

Preboot volume: used to assist the Mac boot-up process.

Recovery volume: contains the recovery system of your Mac to restore Mac from a backup.

VM(Virtual Machine) volume: considered as a RAM supplement, temporarily stores swap files, sleep images, and other large components.

Given that "Other Volumes" are crucial parts for the system to run, Other Volumes in Container may not need removing, and you cannot completely delete other volumes in a container on Mac. But when you find it gobbles up a lot of storage, you can try some tips to prevent it from expanding and reclaiming some free space.

Bear in mind, back up all your important files before cleaning other volumes on Mac. If you accidentally delete or lose some files on your Macintosh HD volume, you can use iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover. 

Method 1. Create a new user account

Method 2. Turn off content caching

Method 3. Delete extra APFS volumes

Method 4. Erase the disk and reinstall macOS

Method 5. Use a Mac cleaner

For detailed steps, you can read:

 Other Volumes in Container: Explanation & How to Delete

Mac Startup Disk is Full, Here's how to Free Up Disk Space

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