Why Other Users and Shared Storage Get So Big on Mac

You open About This Mac, click Storage, and there it is. Other Users is sitting at 41GB. Shared is another 14GB. You're the only person who uses this laptop.

That second part is what throws people off. "Other Users" sounds like it belongs to somebody else, so people assume it's a glitch or leftover from a machine they bought used. It almost never is.

Why Other Users and Shared Storage Get So Big on Mac

I've dug through this exact bar on more than a dozen Macs now, from a base M1 Air to a maxed-out Studio, and the pattern repeats every time. These two categories aren't broken. They're just badly named for what they actually track.

Why This Got More Confusing on Recent macOS Versions

Older macOS releases lumped almost everything unexplained into a single bucket called "Other." At least that was honest about being a catch-all.

Starting around macOS Ventura, Apple split that bucket into separate labels: System Data, Other Users, Purgeable, and a few smaller ones depending on your setup. That sounds like progress, but it actually created more confusion, not less.

People now see "Other Users" specifically and assume it must mean literal other people using their computer. In reality, it's a leftover naming choice from an era when Macs really were shared family desktops sitting in a living room.

Modern Macs are mostly single-user laptops, yet the storage labeling still assumes 2010-era usage patterns. That mismatch is the entire reason this topic keeps trending in search results every few months.

What macOS Actually Means by "Other Users"

Every macOS install keeps at least one hidden account around besides the one you log into every day. There's a Guest account framework, a root-adjacent system account, and on most machines, the remnants of any account you ever created and later deleted.

Each of those accounts gets its own home folder tucked under /Users. macOS attributes any file living inside an account folder that isn't yours to "Other Users," regardless of how small or irrelevant that account actually is.

Here's the part that surprises most people:

  • A deleted user account doesn't always take its files with it
  • Migration Assistant transfers sometimes leave a shadow copy of the old account
  • Shared iCloud Photo Libraries can quietly duplicate data across every local account
  • Old FileVault-encrypted home folders can linger even after the account is gone

I once found 22GB attributed to a design contractor's account that had been removed from a client's iMac eight months earlier. Deleting the user didn't delete the folder — a permissions quirk had left it orphaned on disk.

Family iMacs are the worst offenders by far. A shared kitchen or living-room Mac with a parent account and two kid accounts routinely shows 60GB or more under Other Users, since each profile has its own Photos library cache, its own Messages database, and its own browser history sitting untouched for years.

Work Macs handed down between employees carry a similar pattern. IT departments frequently create a fresh account for the new hire instead of wiping the machine, and the previous employee's account gets disabled rather than deleted. Disabled is not the same as gone — the home folder and every gigabyte inside it stays exactly where it was.

Pro Tip: Before you touch anything, open Terminal and run sudo du -sh /Users/* to see exactly which account folder is the actual offender. Storage Management lumps everyone together, but this command names names.

What "Shared" Actually Refers To

This one confuses people even more because "Shared" sounds like network storage or an iCloud feature. It isn't.

macOS has a literal folder at /Users/Shared. It's a scratch space every local account can read and write to, and installers use it constantly without telling you.

Software installers frequently dump temporary packages there mid-install and forget to clean up afterward. Older versions of Adobe, Microsoft Office, and various game launchers are repeat offenders.

Common residents of /Users/Shared include:

  • Leftover installer payloads from apps you installed years ago
  • Font caches shared across every account on the machine
  • Adobe's "Adobe" folder, which can balloon past 5GB on its own
  • Old Parallels or VMware snapshot fragments
  • Printer driver packages nobody uninstalled properly

If you've ever tried clearing temp files properly on your Mac, you've probably already brushed up against this folder without realizing it. Temp cleanup tools scan it, but they're often cautious about deleting from a shared location since multiple accounts technically have claim to it.

That caution is exactly why the folder grows unchecked for years on machines with more than one user profile.

How These Categories Stack Up Against Everything Else

Not every storage category behaves the same way, and treating them identically is how people end up deleting the wrong thing.

Category What lives there How safe to clean Typical size on a neglected Mac
Other Users Other account home folders, orphaned profiles Moderate — verify account is truly unused first 5–40GB
Shared /Users/Shared installer junk, cross-account caches High — mostly disposable leftovers 2–15GB
System Data Caches, logs, Time Machine local snapshots Moderate — some of it regenerates on its own 20–100GB
Purgeable Files macOS will auto-delete when space runs low Very high — safe to ignore entirely Varies, often overstated
Documents/Apps Your actual files and installed software Low — you control this directly Varies

Notice that Other Users and Shared sit in a weirder spot than System Data. System Data is almost entirely disposable machine junk. Other Users might contain a colleague's genuine, still-needed files.

That distinction is why blanket "storage cleaner" apps make people nervous, and rightly so.

Purgeable space deserves a special mention since it scares people the most for no good reason. It's essentially a promise from macOS: "I can delete this the moment you actually need the room." iCloud-synced photo originals and old iOS backups often live here, and manually deleting them just forces an immediate re-download later.

Other Users and Shared don't get that same auto-management. Nothing purges them automatically, which is exactly why they're the two categories most likely to just keep growing, year after year, until someone finally goes looking.

My Actual Hands-On Workflow

I don't trust the graphical Storage Management pane for anything beyond a first glance. It rounds numbers, hides file paths, and refuses to show you what's inside Other Users at all in most macOS versions.

Here's what I actually do when a client Mac shows a bloated Other Users or Shared category:

  1. Open Terminal and check every account folder size with sudo du -sh /Users/*/
  2. Cross-reference the results against System Settings > Users & Groups to see which accounts are still active
  3. Check /Users/Shared separately with du -sh /Users/Shared/*
  4. Look inside any account folder over 5GB using du -sh ~/Library/* for that specific user
  5. Flag anything tied to an app you no longer have installed

That last step matters more than people think. If you find a 6GB folder belonging to an app you uninstalled a while back, it's almost always safe to remove, since the parent app can't touch it anymore anyway.

On a 2021 MacBook Pro I tested this on, the breakdown looked like this before cleanup:

  • Other Users: 38GB (32GB from one long-deleted account, 6GB from active caches)
  • Shared: 11GB (9GB from three different Adobe installer remnants)

After a targeted cleanup — not a blanket "clean everything" run — I recovered 43GB without touching a single file the current user actually needed.

Three More Machines, Three Different Culprits

Testing this across other setups made it clear there's no single fix that applies everywhere, only a consistent method for finding the actual cause.

A shared family iMac running Sonoma showed 71GB under Other Users. The breakdown traced back almost entirely to two kids' accounts, each with three years of untouched Photos caches and duplicate Messages attachments nobody had ever opened twice.

A studio's shared render Mac showed 19GB under Shared alone. The cause turned out to be render-farm software dumping temporary project caches into /Users/Shared instead of a proper temp directory, a known quirk with a couple of older 3D rendering plugins.

A personal MacBook Air with only one account still showed 9GB under Other Users. That one came down to a disabled Guest account that had briefly been enabled for a houseguest months earlier and never fully cleared afterward.

Pro Tip: If Terminal intimidates you, Disk Utility's First Aid won't show any of this, but Finder's "Go to Folder" (Cmd+Shift+G) typing /Users/Shared will get you into that folder visually. You just can't see other account folders this way due to permissions.

The Honest Limitations Here

I want to be straight about where this gets messy, because most guides gloss over it.

You genuinely cannot see inside another active user's home folder without their permission or admin credentials, even as the machine's owner. That's a macOS privacy boundary working as intended, not a bug.

Some of what's flagged as Other Users is System Integrity Protection territory. Deleting the wrong thing here can break login for that account entirely, and there's no simple undo.

A few more honest caveats:

  • Time Machine local snapshots sometimes get miscounted into Other Users on older macOS versions
  • FileVault encryption makes it harder to inspect orphaned folders without decrypting them first
  • Some third-party "storage optimizers" report inflated numbers to upsell their paid cleanup tier
  • Apple's own numbers in Storage Management can lag behind reality by several gigabytes until you reboot

I've also seen cases where deleting an "orphaned" account folder too aggressively broke a shared Keychain reference, locking out saved Wi-Fi passwords for every account on the machine. Test in small steps, not one giant purge.

There's also a hardware angle people miss entirely. On Macs with smaller SSDs — the base 256GB configurations especially — even a modest 15GB Shared folder can be the difference between smooth operation and constant "startup disk almost full" warnings, since macOS itself needs a healthy chunk of free space just to manage virtual memory swapping. A machine with a 2TB drive barely notices the same 15GB.

Encrypted APFS containers add one more wrinkle. If FileVault is on and you're inspecting an account that isn't yours, some folder sizes reported by du can be inaccurate until the volume is fully mounted and decrypted for that specific user context, which only happens after that person logs in at least once per session.

Practical Setup and Terminal Commands

If you're comfortable with Terminal, this is the fastest and safest route since it shows you exact paths before you delete anything.

Start with an inventory, not a deletion:

sudo du -sh /Users/*/ 2>/dev/null
du -sh /Users/Shared/* 2>/dev/null

For any suspiciously large folder that turns out to belong to a genuinely deleted account, confirm it's orphaned first:

dscl . -list /Users

Compare that account list against the folder names you found. Anything present as a folder but absent from that list is a strong deletion candidate.

Before deleting anything from /Users/Shared, close every app that might be actively using it — installers and license managers sometimes keep files locked there even when idle.

If you'd rather go the safer, more general route first, running through a full system cleanup pass before diving into account-specific folders tends to shrink the problem naturally, since a good chunk of Shared bloat is just old installer debris that a general cleanup already targets.

Once you've cleared confirmed junk, restart the Mac before checking Storage Management again. The category sizes genuinely don't refresh live in most macOS versions.

For a genuinely orphaned account folder with no matching entry in dscl . -list /Users, admin-level removal looks like this:

sudo rm -rf /Users/OldAccountName

Treat that command with real caution. There's no confirmation prompt, no Trash, and no undo once it runs.

If you manage more than one Mac — a household with a shared iMac plus a couple of laptops, for instance — it's worth running the inventory command on all of them once a year rather than waiting for Storage Management to flash a low-space warning. Catching a 30GB orphaned account early is a two-minute fix. Catching it after your drive is at 98% capacity turns into a much more stressful afternoon.

FAQ

Why does Other Users show data when I'm the only account on my Mac? Hidden system accounts and the Guest account framework still count, along with any account you've ever created and removed. macOS rarely fully purges a deleted account's home folder on the first pass.

Is it safe to just delete everything inside /Users/Shared? Mostly, but not blindly. Check that no installer or license manager is currently running before you clear it, since a handful of apps store active session data there temporarily.

Will resetting my Mac actually fix a bloated Other Users category? Yes, but it's overkill for most people. A targeted cleanup using Terminal's du command usually recovers the same space in twenty minutes without a full wipe.

Does upgrading macOS make Other Users or Shared grow bigger? Sometimes temporarily, since installers stage large payloads in Shared during the update. That space typically clears itself within a day or two after installation finishes.

Mac storage categories are only confusing because Apple never bothered to expose what's actually inside them. Other Users and Shared aren't system mysteries — they're just the two spots on your drive where forgotten accounts and lazy installers quietly pile up over years of normal use. Once you know to check /Users directly instead of trusting the colored bar, this stops being a recurring panic and becomes a five-minute maintenance check you run maybe twice a year.