System data storage use on my mac is huge, how to clean it possible solution

Just moving to an apple silicon ran into issues with the System data storage use on my mac was huge. thought this would help someone else, lots of discussion on Time Machine snap shots, which is a offender, but be sure to check that you do not have another offending application, in my case it was tech tool pro making a huge file, so check those as well.

YOU do not need to do a bunch of work thru the terminal and buy all kinds of software, your Mac will help you find the offending files, here is how and the link, but also in writing in case link disappears as they often do.

https://www.macworld.com/article/551402/how-to-manage-time-machine-snapshots-disk-utility.html

You can view snapshots by following these steps in Monterey with Disk Utility version 21:

. Launch Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.

$. Select your startup volume in the left-hand sidebar; with

Catalina or later, select the volume group, labeled as

“volumes.”

%. Choose View > Show APFS Snapshots. (Note that Apple

only shows this option in the system View menu, not the View menu labeled within the Disk Utility window!)

At the bottom of the volume view, you can see all the snapshots made for that volume. Double-click any snapshot, and it mounts in the Finder as a browsable volume. This can be much easier than using Time Machine to find a given set of older files.

Monterey’s update to Disk Utility lets you view information about, mount, and delete snapshots.

You can select any snapshot and click the – (minus) button beneath the list to delete it. 

Warning! This is irreversible.

To get a little more information in the list, click the ... (More) button and choose Show Columns > Private Size. This reflects the actual space occupied on the drive by the snapshot. This is in contrast to the Tidemark, which tracks the smallest partition size that can be currently used to hold the active files and snapshots based on how data is structured in the snapshots.