Hello
I need help please:
My laptop has 250GB of storage of which 219GB is taken up by System.
How can I see what is going on with my system and rectify it?
I am using High Sierra 10.13.6 and I am unable to upgrade as I do not have enough storage.
I am a total luddite when it comes to computers so please help with idiot proof answers.Thanks in advance.
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13
Apple has made it nearly impossible to know or control what is going on, but...
Have you emptied the trash lately?
Look for iOS backups…
/Users/[USERNAME]/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.
https://www.omnigroup.com/more/
Purging local backups
Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.
Start Terminal from spotlight.
At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates.
Hit enter.
Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.
Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.
Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.
Hit enter.
Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required
http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / # deletes all the snapshots
Apple has made it nearly impossible to know or control what is going on, but...
Have you emptied the trash lately?
Look for iOS backups…
/Users/[USERNAME]/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.
https://www.omnigroup.com/more/
Purging local backups
Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.
Start Terminal from spotlight.
At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates.
Hit enter.
Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.
Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.
Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.
Hit enter.
Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required
http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / # deletes all the snapshots
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond.
Sadly, it did not work for me as it seems that I do not have Time Machine back-ups.
Eventually I downloaded OmniDiskSweeper which seems to have erased about 100GB of Data. I have no idea of what or from where but it is gone.
So thanks a million!
OK, take care my friend! :)
How to manage System storage - it is using 219GB out of 250GB
