I noticed after my update to MAC OS 12 Monterey that my System Data Folder swelled to an incredible 320 GB, which is 1/3 of the FULL HD. Before the update (was running BIG Sur), the Folder was called Other and was only about 40-50 GB. Any suggestions? It eats disk space unnecessarily. Now also the backups etc are huge. Would appreciate any input. Best, Dino
iMac 24″, macOS 12.0
It turned out to have nothing to do with the system for me. Fortnite was hiding its content in the system folder. I went into Terminal and drilled down. I started with
du -hcd2 /System/Volumes 2> /dev/null
which looks in the given folder (/System/Volumes) and lists all the folders under it and the folders those contain, and the amount of data in each. I found the biggest of those and iterated.
du -hcd2 /System/Volumes/Data/Users 2> /dev/null
Until the culprit was revealed. So, I deleted the old, old version of Fortnite that runs on Apple. Ironically, this is one of our kids' macbooks, and they just wanted space to install xcode to get ready for Fortnite Creative 3.0, but I don't think they'll miss 2-year-old Fortnite.
Just to be pedantic, I'll explain the command. 'du' shows how much disk is used. '-' means options, h means use 'human readable' notation (GB, MB, KB), c means print a summary amount and d2 means go two levels deep. That's just so I don't get too much data to navigate. The '2>/dev/null' bit at the end discards error messages.
I hope this helps!
It turned out to have nothing to do with the system for me. Fortnite was hiding its content in the system folder. I went into Terminal and drilled down. I started with
du -hcd2 /System/Volumes 2> /dev/null
which looks in the given folder (/System/Volumes) and lists all the folders under it and the folders those contain, and the amount of data in each. I found the biggest of those and iterated.
du -hcd2 /System/Volumes/Data/Users 2> /dev/null
Until the culprit was revealed. So, I deleted the old, old version of Fortnite that runs on Apple. Ironically, this is one of our kids' macbooks, and they just wanted space to install xcode to get ready for Fortnite Creative 3.0, but I don't think they'll miss 2-year-old Fortnite.
Just to be pedantic, I'll explain the command. 'du' shows how much disk is used. '-' means options, h means use 'human readable' notation (GB, MB, KB), c means print a summary amount and d2 means go two levels deep. That's just so I don't get too much data to navigate. The '2>/dev/null' bit at the end discards error messages.
I hope this helps!
Go to the Users/Home/Library folder and check the size of the Mail folder. I had a similar problem and the Mail folder was as large as the rest of the files put together.
I was communicating with the Carbon Copy Cloner developers and they inspected some diagnostic files that we created and found there were several folders names "Data_Rebuild" that were the culprits. I found them using the shareware app Find Any File by searching for:
1 - Name contains Data_Rebuild
The folders that were found were be dragged from the search results window to the Trash bin in the Dock for deletion.
FAF can search areas that Spotlight can't like invisible folders, system folders and packages.
I believe that the size of those folders was from repeatedly rebuilding the mailboxes in my Mail app. Deleting those folders and rebooting brought the size back down to what it should be.
Update: It turns out it was Carbon Copy Cloner for me. Found a drive snapshot of over 500GB which, when deleted, gave me a lot of free space on the internal SSD.
For some reason I was using an older version of CCC which isn't "officially" supported in Monterey. Since updating to CCC 6 and turning off the snapshot feature, the issue hasn't returned.
So if you're using CCC, may want to look into those snapshots taking up a ton of drive space.
If there has been an Abort or Failed Installation of Big Sur or Monterey - there might be a additional Volume that is a leftover from the Failed or Aborted Installation .
Suggest Disk Utilities >> View >> View ALL attached Drives. and provide a Screen Shot
Should above not apply to this computer >>
What is “Other” storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out?
In Monterey the “Other “ category is named “ System Storage “.
Free up storage space on your Mac
How to delete Time Machine snapshots on your Mac
See used and available storage space on your Mac
Locate backups of your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
The final word from Apple on Managing the " Other " Category
Other: Contains files that don’t fall into the categories listed here. This category primarily includes files and data used by the system, such as log files, caches, VM files, and other runtime system resources. Also included are temporary files, fonts, app support files, and plug-ins. You can't manage the contents of this category. The contents are managed by macOS, and the category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac.
For me the problem was OneDrive, which had moved my entire file system from the Cloud into this secret place, and pretended that it was using 'Files on Demand' to 'free up space' when it patently wasn't. It even copied files I had actually previously not synchronised and I was down to 60Gb free on a 1Tb SSD, with 560 Gb in System Data. Other app-users of System Data seemed to be backup programs like Time Machine and perhaps CarbonCopy Cloner.
I got myself back into a workable situation by disconnecting OneDrive, deleting the real copies I had restored to my Mac (outside System Data), and then reconnecting OneDrive. The System Data is still huge, but I don't also have the files in Finder outside System Data (just aliases linking to the System Data versions).
I now have 300Gb in System Data, and 300Gb free space instead of 50Gb; presumably if I ever go below 50Gb OneDrive would have purged some of the files I had not recently touched. These days though, 50Gb is not enough free space for swapping things around, and everything went very slowly.
I had the same problem. System data was showing at 308GB.
I used the 'Space Lens' feature on CleanMyMac X. It showed me that a 'home movies' folder deep in my libraries had somehow captured 280GB of movie files that I had moved to an external drive.
I double checked that they were still on my external drive and not corrupted in any way and then easily deleted the files and I'm back to a reasonable 19Gb of 'system data'.
The frustrating thing was that when I 'got info' on the parent 'Libraries' folder it listed the size as only 10GB so I didn't bother digging any further.
A weight has been lifted from my shoulders!
I would download and use the free OmniDisksweeper app.
https://omnidisksweeper.en.softonic.com/mac
and see if you can find what is using a lot of storage. Include look in the Library folders for logs and other large uses or storage.
Less than a week ago another users had similar but worse problem. They looked at the Library folder and found that Kaspersky Internet Protection was recording 100's BG of logs.
I recommend coming back with what you think it could be the cause and not delete stuff without coming here. If you delete necessary stuff that really can cause problem.
I just did some major digging and found that I had two Adobe Acrobats installed on OS Monterey. One just called "Acrobat" and the other Acrobat DC. "Acrobat" was running behind the scenes and making my 2019 MacBook Pro fan constantly run and was downloading 400 GB at a time. Was able to figure out two solutions:
Seems ok so far. Fan is quiet and it's not downloading massive amounts of storage so far. Fingers crossed!
UPDATE: OK, so it's definitely Adobe Acrobat DC and Acrobat. I just reinstalled from the Adobe Creative Cloud and my fan is running and it's downloading like crazy. Getting this app off my computer ASAP. It just downloaded 1.9 GB in 4 min to my CoreSync folder as a .log
You have to not only "uninstall" it from Adobe Creative Cloud and then run the Acrobat Installer in the Adobe Acrobat DC folder.
auderio wrote:
I noticed after my update to MAC OS 12 Monterey that my System Data Folder swelled to an incredible 320 GB, which is 1/3 of the FULL HD. Before the update (was running BIG Sur), the Folder was called Other and was only about 40-50 GB. Any suggestions? It eats disk space unnecessarily. Now also the backups etc are huge. Would appreciate any input. Best, Dino
I noticed after my update to MAC OS 12 Monterey - this would have been an UpGrade.
An update would have been Big Sur 11.6.1 to Big Sur 11.6.3
Has there been any aborted or otherwise failed update occurring while running Big Sur ?
Has there been any aborted or otherwise failed upGrade from Big Sur to Monterey ?
Either of the two above could have created and duplicate or triplicate " Volume " called Macintosh HD - Data
Suggest open Disk Utilities >> View >> View ALL Attached Drives and present a Screen Shot of what is appearing .
I used Daisy Disk to explore more deeply into the other category.
My problem was local stored Time Machine snapshots. As I understand it these should have been cleared at the end of a session by MacOS but maybe because of a crash were not.
Anyway I was able to delete these and recover about 300GB of disk space and my system data is under 30 GB now.
Obviously you have to be careful with any deletions in this area. I did a back up of everything before changing anything to be sure.
But my system has been operating with no issue for about a month and the problem has not reoccured.
So I was experiencing this issue myself. My system folder was right around 300gb out of my 1tb drive. After doing some digging in the library files I was able to determine that Google Drive, which is located in application support folder of library, was using the bulk of this system storage for its cache. After erasing the contents of the cached folder I was able to return the storage back to the pool. I suspect that this answer could be different for everyone depending upon what applications they use on their Macs but for me it was Google Drive.
OmniDiskSweeper or CleanMyMacX do a good job of giving more details on the biggest folders on my system classified as "System Data". I look them up in Finder and Google info about them before deleting those files. I know someone's going to say "you shouldn't be using these apps..." but there's no official solution besides "buy a new laptop with more storage".
I now blame OneDrive for this catastrophe though - found a 300Gb folder in my user Library with the suffix OneDriveStandaloneSuite, containing all of the documents that are ALSO synchronised to my Documents/OneDrive folder. This seems to be a result of the totally dire decision to make the default in OneDrive 'Files on Demand', which I immediately had to override as I use my mac offline a great deal and need access to my files. So now it seems to have everything twice, once for real and once cached, and really stupidly even the folders I had always marked to not be synchronised are now also in the cache. I shall try a clean install to get out of this mess if it doesn't resolve itself overnight. Unfortunately I need OneDrive because of my workplace rules, so it will probable come back again. Who'd believe 1Tb wouldn't be enough.
671GB here....this is so frustrating. Apple fix this ASAP pls!
You've apparently reinstalled incorrectly about seven times (note all of the "- Data"'s). Odds are you have several orphaned Data drives. Do you see any volumes named with a - Data suffix if you Go > Computer.
Open Disk Utility and look at the drive list. Are there any volumes named with a - Data suffix listed below the Macintosh Volumes group?
Ran into it as well though with only ~60 GB system data after Monterey update.
I followed these instructions "System data taking 170GB storage space - Apple Community" and got it shrinked down to 29 GB.
Best, r.
After MAC OS 12 Monterey update that System Data Folder swelled to incredible 320 GB
