Why is my System Data taking up so much space in my Macintosh HD drive?

Hi there advaith151,

We understand you're experiencing an issue with the storage space on your MacBook Air.

Get started with the steps here: Free up storage space on your Mac

Also, do you have a lot of content in the Mail app? If so, that may be contributing to the storage usage. Learn more here: See used and available storage space on your Mac

We hope this helps.

The only way to free up space on a drive is to delete user data. If you wish to keep the data, you'll need to copy it to an external drive or cloud storage (not iCloud) and then delete the copied data. If it stays on your drive in any form, it takes up space.

Usual offending files are large videos, movies, pictures and massive amounts of documents.

You're welcome in retrospect.

So, it's other files and data: documents, spreadsheets, old downloads and the like. The movies and pictures were just a possibility because they can be quite large and usually there's a lot of them. But it can be anything, even no longer needed users. All sorts of possibilities. One thing is for certain, it's files of some sort and unless you have a lot of large footprint apps, it's user data.

One thing to keep in mind is you have a small-by-today's-standards drive so storage on an external drive is a good alternative. You system needs about 25-30GB completely unused space for the OS to function properly.