What the Other Users & Shared storage category means on a Mac

2 October 2026 · 6 min read

Other Users & Shared is the part of your disk that belongs to accounts other than the one you are logged into, plus the folders no single account owns, chiefly /Users/Shared. It is closed on purpose: from your account you get a total, never a list. To see inside it, each person checks their own Storage screen, or an administrator measures the folders directly.

Where the row is and what the name means

Open System Settings, General, Storage. Below the colored bar is a list of categories, and on a Mac with more than one account, one of them is Other Users & Shared. That is the wording on macOS 15 Sequoia; earlier versions may phrase it differently. Unlike Applications or Documents, it does not open into a list of files.

The two halves of the name are two different things.

Other Users is every account on the Mac except yours. The figure is relative to whoever is looking: log in as your partner and your own files move into their Other Users & Shared total, while theirs come out of it and are itemized properly.

Shared is the space in the Users folder that belongs to nobody in particular.

It is not the old Other category that older versions of macOS showed in the storage bar. That leftover bucket is now called System Data, and what System Data is on a Mac covers it.

What counts toward it

Every other account’s home folder, all of it. That includes their Photos library, their mail, their iPhone backups, their Downloads, their Library of caches and app data, and their Trash. Each account keeps its own copy of everything, so two people who both imported the same family photos are storing them twice.

/Users/Shared. The one folder every account can write to. Installers for some creative and audio software keep shared libraries and licensing data here. macOS adds to it as well: after an upgrade it can leave a Relocated Items folder holding configuration files it moved aside, and on a Mac that has been through several upgrades you can find Previously Relocated Items, then Previously Relocated Items 1, 2 and onward. Those are usually small. Video files and installers someone moved here to pass along are usually not.

/Users/Deleted Users. When an account is deleted with the option “Save the home folder in a disk image”, macOS saves that image in this folder, and it is often the largest forgotten item on a family Mac. On macOS 15, the component that calculates this row refers to both /Users/Shared and /Users/Deleted Users by path, so both are very likely included. Apple does not document the exact rules.

What it leaves out. Apps in the Applications folder have their own row. macOS itself, Time Machine local snapshots and swap fall under macOS or System Data.

The gray area. Deleting an account with “Don’t change the home folder” leaves the folder in /Users but no longer attached to anybody. Apple does not say where such a folder is counted, and it may not be in this row at all. Run ls -l /Users in Terminal to spot one: an orphaned folder shows a number in the owner column instead of a name, or has a name that matches no account in System Settings, Users & Groups.

Why you cannot open it

This is a privacy decision, not a missing feature. The Storage screen lists files by name, and file names alone say a great deal: a folder called “Divorce”, a document called “Resignation letter draft”. Listing another person’s files on your screen would leak exactly that.

The permissions agree. The contents of another account’s Desktop, Documents and Library are readable only by that account, and macOS adds a second layer of privacy protection over folders such as Desktop and Documents. Even to an administrator, someone else’s Documents folder shows in Finder with a red no-entry badge and will not open.

So the built-in route is to ask each person to sign in and open their own Storage screen, where their account is itemized as fully as yours is for you.

How an administrator can see inside

Some of this needs no special rights. Anyone can list the Users folder and measure the shared one:

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

The second command prints one size per item in the shared folder, largest last.

Measuring other people’s home folders is different. It takes an administrator account, sudo, and Terminal switched on under System Settings, Privacy and Security, Full Disk Access, without which the totals come back short by whatever the privacy protections hid. The command is du run against each folder in /Users, and it can take a long time on a full disk. A shared Mac: which user account is using all the space walks through it, including the flags that keep it from counting a backup drive and the usual suspects inside a large account.

Expect the sum to differ from the Storage row. du counts files that APFS stores as shared clones at their full size, Storage settings treats purgeable space in its own way, and the Storage figure is calculated in the background, so it can lag behind what is actually on the disk.

Making it smaller without stepping on anyone

1. Start with the shared folder. Remove installers, archives and video you or someone else parked there. Leave folders that belong to installed software, because deleting a shared library can break the app that uses it.
2. Deal with Deleted Users. Open a disk image there (it mounts like any other, though macOS may ask for an administrator password), confirm nothing in it is still needed, then delete it.
3. Check for orphaned home folders. Same approach: look before you delete, since it may be the only copy of an old account’s photos.
4. Talk to the person whose account is large. Bring a number and a folder, not a complaint. Do not delete files from another account’s home folder yourself, even when you are able to.
5. Remove accounts nobody uses. In System Settings, Users & Groups, deleting an account offers three choices for the home folder. Choose “Delete the home folder” only once you are sure, because the other two choices are how the folders in steps 2 and 3 came to exist.

If you would rather see the whole picture without assembling it from Terminal, Crumb audits the whole Mac rather than only the account you are logged into, and includes a cross-user leaderboard showing which account is using the space. The whole-Mac audit is free; $9 once unlocks the full feature set, cross-user features included, on up to 2 Macs. It deletes nothing without a plan you have approved, which matters more on a machine where some of the files are not yours.

Questions

Why does Other Users & Shared show a large figure on a Mac only I use? Look for an account you forgot: a second one created during setup, one a previous owner left, or one Migration Assistant brought across. Then check /Users/Shared and /Users/Deleted Users. The ls -l /Users listing above shows all three possibilities at once.

Does the Guest account count? Its home folder is emptied when the guest logs out, so it is almost never the answer.

Will moving my files into /Users/Shared hide them from my own total? It moves them from your categories into this one, which changes the label and not the space used. It also puts them in the one folder every account is meant to reach, which is rarely what you want for private files.