Why is the System Area on my MacBook Air taking up 168GB of space.

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Level 1

4 points

Why is the System Area on my MacBook Air taking up 168GB of space.

I received the "not enough disk space available" message when I tried to update from macOS Mojave Version 10.14.6 to macOS Catalina which requires 11.95 GB of space.

I have Store in iCloud turned on, Optimize Completed, Empty Trash Automatically Completed and I have gone through and removed what I can from other files.

Before I go through the trouble of getting a flash drive and removing files I really need, I would like to know if there is anything I can do because the System is taking up way more than have of my disk space.

Also, I noticed that while I have Store in iCloud turned on it only has 932 MB of space used when my Documents section has 29.45GB. I thought iCloud was suppose to move all older files to the cloud and free up disk space.

I have tried googling this issue and I keep coming across 3rd party apps that say they can fix the issue and reduce the size of the system space that is being taking up - but I have never had to use a 3rd party app and I really do not want to.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Tony

MacBook Air

Posted on Apr 11, 2020 11:13 AM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,017 points

Apr 11, 2020 11:56 AM in response to Mrkazman

Get Correct Storage Information

Do not use the information from the Storage section of the About This Mac dialog. Ignore the Storage information as it is typically wrong. To find out the correct information for any disk: Select a Desktop disk icon. Press Command-I to open the Get Info window and look at the topmost panel displayed. You will find the disk information displayed for Capacity, Available, and Used. If you have more than one disk/partition then repeat for each one on your Desktop.

The categories found in the Storage section of About This Mac is simply an arbitrary way of displaying files on your drive. There are no such categories actually on the drive.

Where did all that free space go on my APFS disk?

How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive

You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
Also, see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
What is 'Other' and 'Purgeable' in About This Mac?
Files That Make Up the 'Other' Storage Category, and How to Remove Them
Free up storage space on your Mac.
See Where did my Disk Space go?.
Be sure to Empty the Trash to recover the space.
Replace the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
Use OmniDiskSweeper or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

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Why is the System Area on my MacBook Air taking up 168GB of space.

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