storage
My system takes up 90% of my storage. If there is a way to fix this it love to know
MacBook Air 13", macOS 10.13
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Don't rush to erase and restore your computer from a backup. There are a number of possible explanations for what you are seeing that don't require such a drastic step. Do these things first and let us know the results:
- When you first look at the Storage graph you'll see calculating because the graphic is being created in real time. Once the colors pop up and labels appear it looks like its finished, but if you continue to watch you may see some of the colored bars change. Give it some time. I've seen my System bar shrink just by waiting...
- if you use TimeMachine to back up your computer but don't keep the backup drive connected (or reconnect frequently) TimeMachine will make backups to the computer's internal drive on its regular schedule. After 24 hours the oldest should be erased but sometimes this fails leading to a large amount of TM snapshots. Similarly, if you've made a huge change to the computer in the last day your snapshots will be huge. Solution: connect your TM drive and let TM do its job. Once the backup is complete the snapshots will be erased.
- Your computer may be (or may have been) logging a large number of errors. Or the system, or an application, may have failed to delete/trim some cache files. These can quickly get large. Solution: restart in Safe Mode (hold the shift key while restarting). This will do a drive directory repair, trim/delete caches, and the log file. Once you've booted into the Finder, restart normally.
Having completed steps 2 and 3 you should see your Free drive space increase but the System size may not have changed all that much. This could be because of Spotlight's known index bug. See this article about reindexing: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716
Finally, I no longer bother with the Spotlight information. There are a number of programs, free and shareware, that can show you how the drive is being used - I prefer DiskDaisy which is a shareware program available at the app store. Another good program, free, is OmniDiskSweeper.
