Apple Storage: System taking majority of GB

MuradH Said:

"Apple Storage: System taking majority of GB: Hello, I have a question regarding the 'System' in my Apple MacBook. When accessing 'About This Mac' and going to Storage, half of my GB are used on "system." Is there a way to delete some parts of my storage, or is this something that remains on my MacBook permanently?"

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For reference...

"Other" being the Culprit:

Use my User Tip: The storage named "Other"(or "System Data") is a grey bar seen in storage. How to Clear "Other" in your iPhone's Storage - Use Backup - User Tip

Tough to say...

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)

System Memory OS 10.12.6 Sierra - Apple Community

System Memory OS 10.12.6 Sierra - Apple Community

4 suggestions…

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

Thanks to BobHarris file sizes, Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal:...

sudo du -hx | sort -h 

sudo du -hx ~/| sort -h