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I have been receiving notifications saying my disk is almost full, and have followed the instructions on how to free up space. However, when I open the About this Mac window, it shows that it has over 100 GB in system. I read somewhere that this is due to back ups. But I use Time Machine for backups. Can you help me free up space? Thank you.
MacBook Air
As far as I know (other community members may prove me wrong) the only way to fix this is to erase your Mac and reinstall MacOS. You will have to set it up as new, but it would drastically free up space on your machine. Before you do this, however, make sure to disconnect your time machine drive to make sure that it is not the one the system is saying is full.
Go to Apple’s instructions for resetting your Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201065
Once you do this, the “system” should only take up about 10-15 GB in space.
As far as I know (other community members may prove me wrong) the only way to fix this is to erase your Mac and reinstall MacOS. You will have to set it up as new, but it would drastically free up space on your machine. Before you do this, however, make sure to disconnect your time machine drive to make sure that it is not the one the system is saying is full.
Go to Apple’s instructions for resetting your Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201065
Once you do this, the “system” should only take up about 10-15 GB in space.
Depending on how you use Time Machine (external 1+TB USB drive) your Mac
stores backups on home internal drive, until it can move/copy those to external.
Most macOS systems are much larger than 15-20GB. {A bare bones new install of
Mojave 10.14.6 in my mid-2012 13-inch MacBook/Pro with no third-party apps; is
about 40GB.} This model has 240GB 'Blade' SSD.
The EtreCheck utility could show and tell the content usage of your MacBook/Air.
A report generated by this, can also be shared (posted in ASC reply) with icon tools
in the Reply box, bottom margin.
EtreCheckPro D/L is available directly from Etresoft. (runs free, if you don't get optional
'Power User' Package) For more general info see EtreCheck site pages.
The Spotlight utility in macOS can be slow to show actual used space in Mac HDD.
To 'Get Info' from highlighted hard drive icon, may be more accurate; 'used -vs- free'
capacities are harder to tell in newer macOS since there usually are four partitions.
Be sure to make additional backups, other than Time Machine, on extra external drives.
Also investigate making bootable clones, there are good utilities for that task; SuperDuper
and Carbon Copy Cloner are fairly well known. Much better than attempting Disk Image.
Good luck & happy trails!🌻🎣
Another possibility is the OS makes local "snapshots" of backups on a laptop if the Time Machine drive is not plugged in. They are supposed to delete themselves once you plug in your TM drive, so it can also depend on how often you have the external drive plugged in and TM doing its thing.
I have been receiving notifications saying my disk is almost full.
