System Data taking up 1.5TB on 2TB hard drive

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System Data taking up 1.5TB on 2TB hard drive

I have a 2019 Macbook Pro running Monterey. I was doing some basic maintenance and realized the 2TB only had 500GB space remaining and slowly shrinking. I have done all of the standard recommended maintenance tasks:

moved all music & photos/videos to an external drive
deleted all device or TM backups
cleaned out system logs, old application data, emptied cache.
removed all large non-essential files
Optimized (storage-manage)
Rebooted in to safe mode and rechecked it.
Reindexed spotlight

Now It's reporting ~350GB of remaining space.

I installed ndcu and OmniDiskSweeper. They are both reporting only ~240GB on the disk.

What is going on?? Help!

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.12

Posted on Jan 24, 2022 11:01 AM

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Answer 1

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d.b.binkus Author

Level 1

5 points

Jan 25, 2022 6:33 AM in response to d.b.binkus

Last night, I wiped the disk, reinstalled Monterey, and migrated all of my data from a TimeMachine backup. TBH it was a very smooth process and this morning the disk is reporting correctly, 2TB with 1.82TB free. It's exactly what I would expect. It seems to me the problem was not with the disk itself (all disk test results were perfect), but with the APFS settings. It's probably not the worst thing to have a new install on a freshly formatted disk.

Thanks for your help, lllaass.

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Answer 2

lllaass

Level 10

210,513 points

Jan 25, 2022 7:15 AM in response to etresoft

For info is TRIM enabled for the disk?

Go to About This Mac>Overview>System Report>SATA>The disk/SSD (not controller)?

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Answer 3

lllaass

Level 10

210,513 points

Jan 24, 2022 12:41 PM in response to d.b.binkus

With an SSD it takes a little time for space to be reclaimed after permanently deleting files.

You did empty Trash?

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Answer 4

d.b.binkus Author

Level 1

5 points

Jan 24, 2022 1:58 PM in response to lllaass

I have repeatedly emptied trash. I rebooted. I just verified the disk, too. No issues reported.

I just did a timemachine backup (No old TM backups using up space)

I'm starting to think I should reinstall the OS

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Answer 5

etresoft

Level 9

56,326 points

Jan 25, 2022 6:53 AM in response to d.b.binkus

d.b.binkus wrote:

I have done all of the standard recommended maintenance tasks:

moved all music & photos/videos to an external drive

• deleted all device or TM backups

• cleaned out system logs, old application data, emptied cache.

• removed all large non-essential files

• Optimized (storage-manage)

• Rebooted in to safe mode and rechecked it.

• Reindexed spotlight

Recommended by whom? You shouldn't have done any of that.

Modern versions of macOS consider storage to be much the same as RAM in that unused storage is considered wasted storage. The computer will use all available storage for its own use. If you run out, then it will automatically make more storage available. If you try to interfere with anything on the system level, you will only make more problems for yourself.

With 500 GB available storage, there is absolutely nothing more you need to do. Everything is fine. I realize that you erased the hard drive and reinstalled. The same thing will happen eventually. The only maintenance you need to perform is cleaning out your downloads every so often. That's it.

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Answer 6

etresoft

Level 9

56,326 points

Jan 25, 2022 7:45 AM in response to lllaass

There probably wouldn't be any SATA interface on a 2019 MacBook Pro. It is NVMe. And TRIM is always enabled on Apple SSDs.

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System Data taking up 1.5TB on 2TB hard drive

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