What is Other Users & Shared in Mac storage?

What it counts

Apple doesn't publish a definition of the category, but its folder guides explain where the space can be. The Users folder on Macintosh HD holds a home folder for each person set up on the Mac, and the Shared folder, whose contents Apple says are "available to anyone who uses your Mac". So Other Users & Shared is, in practice, one or more of these:

• Other accounts' home folders: a family member's account, an old admin account, a test account.
• /Users/Shared: anything a person or an app saved there for every user.
• /Users/Deleted Users: when an account is deleted with "Save the home folder in a disk image", the image is kept here, as big as the home folder was.
• A deleted account's folder left in /Users: the "Don't change the home folder" choice keeps the whole folder where it was.

That is why it can be large even when you are the only person using the Mac: an account you deleted, or set up once and forgot, may still have all its files.

How to see what is in it

In Finder, choose Go → Go to Folder (Shift-Command-G) and type /Users. Each folder there, other than yours and Shared, is another account's home folder or a deleted one's. Look inside Shared and, if it is there, Deleted Users. Other accounts' folders are private to their owners, so for sizes, open Terminal and run:

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

It asks for your administrator password, lists the folders by size with the largest last, and needs Full Disk Access for Terminal (System Settings → Privacy & Security) to count everything.

How to get the space back

An account you no longer need. Delete it the way Apple describes, rather than its folder in Finder:

1. Open System Settings and click Users & Groups.
2. Click the Info button next to the account, then Delete User. You can't delete an account that is logged in.
3. Choose what happens to the home folder. Only Delete the home folder frees the space. Save the home folder in a disk image keeps it all in /Users/Deleted Users, and Don't change the home folder leaves it in /Users.

Before you delete the home folder, make sure nothing in it is the only copy: photos, documents and downloads in an old account are often never copied anywhere else.

A deleted user's leftovers. Open /Users/Deleted Users in Finder, open the disk image or folder, and copy out what you want to keep. Then delete it from Finder; macOS asks for your password.

The Shared folder. Anyone can read what is in it, but only the person who put a file there can delete it. Check with them, or with the app that made it, before you remove it.

What not to do

• Don't rename or move the Users folder or the Shared folder. Apple's advice for folders that came with the Mac is to leave them where they are.
• Don't delete an account that is in use to save space. Its owner loses their files and settings. Move their large files to an external drive instead.

Where the app comes in

In the download edition, RefreshYourMac's Deleted User Account category shows how much /Users/Deleted Users is taking and tells you where to look, and it never deletes it, because a deleted account's folder may hold the one thing nobody copied out. The rest of your storage it measures in one scan, each part with its safety level. For the other Storage categories, see System Data and where Other storage went; for the wider picture, Mac storage full?