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Mac OS Systems Files Too Big

This question was asked a few years ago, but the suspected issue and subsequent recommendation was irrelevant to me. My systems files are taking up about 47 GB of my 121 GB hard disk. I've included screenshots of storage calculations below. I'm just wondering is there any way to decrease this number substantially? I'm getting a new mac with much more storage in few days, but I don't want to carry any of the System files from this Mac over since I know it will already have a bunch of its own. And even if I have to start anew with that Mac, I'd like to know how to avoid this happening again. "It" being the Systems files building up that high.




MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jan 11, 2022 10:08 AM

Reply
1 reply

Jan 11, 2022 11:52 AM in response to Breezy00

Apple must have some kind of new way to hide files, but see if any of these help...


Have you emptied the trash lately?


Terminal code to clean DocumentRevisionsfolder…

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/313102/what-will-occur-if-the-documentrevisions-v100-folder-is-deleted

macos - What will occur if the .DocumentRevisions-V100 folder is deleted? - Ask Different (stackexchange.com)


https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253231342?answerId=256043117022#256043117022

System Memory OS 10.12.6 Sierra - Apple Community


Look for iOS backups…

/Users/YourUserName/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

Mac OS Systems Files Too Big

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