My system data is taking up nearly 200GB and I want to figure out why, as this seems unreasonable for a 500GB mac. I will appreciate any guidance on this issue, as I have looked at other posts regarding this issue and I have not had any success with those approaches.
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14
You clearly have a bigger problem than I suspected.
My recommendation at this point would be to do a total backup, erase your drive, then reinstall the OS. After that, you can migrate your backup onto the fresh OS drive, while perhaps crossing your fingers and praying.
Let me add a few caveats at this point:
I had some bad experiences with Time Machine, which caused me to abandon it completely. It’s not reliable enough in critical situations like this. You can do a total backup, where everything looks fine, then the restore fails with some strange error. After this happened to me a couple of times, I totally gave up on it, and have been using Carbon Copy Cloner ever since. There are other similar backup options available. Since getting CCC, I’ve gone back to the old-fashioned backup methods I learned early in my career. A recent one, an older one, and an even older one. And since I now have multiple Macs, I can use one to restore the other if things go especially bad.
Before doing anything this drastic, you need to assess your own abilities. If things go bad, can you deal with it? Or would you want to take it to an expert? If you think you might end up taking it to an expert, do that now. For my own relatives and friends, I’m the expert. When they get a problem like this, I take over and do it all myself. I have the equipment (software & hardware) and knowledge to handle virtually anything that might happen.
Sorry I can’t be of more help. If you have a local Apple store, you could consider going to them. More than anything, you need to have several backups of your data. If you don’t already, do that ASAP.
Thanks for the suggestion. I have considered doing a backup, wipe clean and reinstall. The only challenge is that I generally would use Time Machine to back it up and it seems to back up the System Data as well. I could do an old fashioned backup (copy all the files over, then copy them back). My only hesitation is that I am not sure if some of the System Data are things I do actually care about (unlikely though).
I’ll wait and see if anyone has alternative suggestions, but I think my approach might be to do the following:
-Use TimeMachine to create a backup of my entire machine
-Create a separate “manual” backup of all files/apps on another external drive
-restore computer to factory conditions
-upload files from external drive.
-if anything goes wrong then I can still have the time machine backup for it
John Galt wrote:
If you determine that the "System Data" category is occupying an inexplicably large amount of storage, refer to See used and available storage space on your Mac - Apple Support. Pay particular attention to the description of System Data.
Apple recently superseded that link. The new one is See used and available storage space on your Mac - Apple Support. It contains the following relevant excerpt I intended to emphasize:
The boldface is mine.
If you determine that the "System Data" category is occupying an inexplicably large amount of storage, refer to See used and available storage space on your Mac - Apple Support. Pay particular attention to the description of System Data.
You may find neuroanatomist's User Tip helpful: What is "Other" storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out? - Apple Community.
JustSomeOldGuy wrote:
The OP never said the OS was alerting him of running out of space.
Judging by that little sliver of white on the end, I think it is safe to assume that the OP's hard drive is running out of space.
As for being released back in a day or some, that doesn't happen on my Macs. Nope. Purgeable Space is not the only issue here, either. There are also those nasty snapshots, and who knows what else.
Yes. Local snapshots are big culprit. They are also one of the more insidious. When people do run out of space, what do they do? Well they start deleting files, of course! And what happens then? Their free space goes even lower!
The **** thing says it's out of space when it's not even close. If I were a cynic, I might suspect it was in Apple's interest to keep users thinking that.
Oh no. When it says it is out of space, it is most definitely out of space. The irony here is that you actually aren't cynical enough. That "out of free space" alert is based on actual "free" storage space. When that runs out, you get the alert.
But then when you go to check how much "free" storage space you have, it actually tells you a different value. It tells you how much "available" storage you have. This is completely different than "free" storage. Unless you take some kind of action via the command line or a "clean up" app, you'll usually have to wait about 24 hours before any "available" storage actually gets purged and converted to "free". I think that if you actually do run out of "free" storage, the purge task automatically kicks off. But even then, it will be a few minutes before any storage is actually freed up. And there is no way to tell or control how much storage it will free.
Considering what they charge for storage, and that it's no longer possible to expand or even replace when it goes bad.
Ah but there is plenty of iCloud storage available on a subscription basis. That's where the real revenue growth is these days. You can pay for local storage up front, or pay for cloud storage by the month later on. Your choice.
Your system may not actually be taking up this much space. This is a “feature“ of macOS. It’s confusing, and there’s too much detail to discuss here. If true, you’ll be able to add a file larger than the available space shown, and still have lots of space left.
I’ve been using Macs for over 10 years, and I still get tricked by this from time to time. It looks like you’re running out of space. Everything shows you’re running out of space. But you’re not really running out of space!
Disagree and when the Operating System alert the User it is running out of Empty Space - that is usually accurate.
There is a big difference between " Purgeable Space " which will be released back as " Empty Space " in a day or some.
At least, that has been my experience since 2004 when entering the Apple Eco-System
The OP never said the OS was alerting him of running out of space. He also never mentioned "purgeable space", and neither did I.
As for being released back in a day or some, that doesn't happen on my Macs. Nope. Purgeable Space is not the only issue here, either. There are also those nasty snapshots, and who knows what else.
I mentioned only what I've personally observed. The **** thing says it's out of space when it's not even close. If I were a cynic, I might suspect it was in Apple's interest to keep users thinking that. Considering what they charge for storage, and that it's no longer possible to expand or even replace when it goes bad. But I would never think such a thing. I bow to Apple's greatness and invincibility.
JustSomeOldGuy wrote:
If true, you’ll be able to add a file larger than the available space shown, and still have lots of space left.
Unfortunately, it has gotten to the point that I cannot unzip a file because it is too large, and I have been getting warnings that my Mac is almost out of space. I am hoping to find out what the contents of system data are specifically so that I can free up more space.
This is helpful to know, but still extremely frustrating to have 200GB that I cannot manage myself. Surely there must be some way via the command line what the contents are? 200GB seems to be very unreasonable for things like fonts and temporary files. I don't have any VMs either.
the category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac.
Has my Mac somehow gotten into a bad state that is taking up all the space? There must be someway to reduce the number of logs and caches, otherwise this category would continue to grow over time until it takes up all the memory, unless I am misunderstanding it. Is this a bug in the Monterey OS?
I also want to note that I cleared my browser history and I set Time Machine to not save local snapshots, but this did not impact System Data. I restarted my computer, and I also tried rebooting in safe mode as suggested in older posts, but none of this has had an effect on the System Data category.
You might find it helpful to download the OS install file in advance, and put it on your backup drive(s) before starting. The link below has everything from Lion to Ventura.
For myself, I keep a USB drive with High Sierra thru Monterey, each in a separate partition, fully installed. Each partition also has its OS install file in its Applications folder. When things go bad, I can boot directly into any OS from that, and carry-on from there. It can be a bit slow, but it works.
Good luck!
How to download macOS - Apple Support <== Includes links to each OS
Mac startup key combinations - Apple Support
Technically, starting in macOS 10.15 Catalina and above.
Time Machine Backup Only Backups the User Account ( Home Folder ) and does not contain a Functional and Complete Working Copy of the Operating System.
Should the user choose the Wipe the Drive 100% clean of All Data - Time Machine Backup can be used with Setup Assist on the very first boot-up after the installation to Migrate ONLY the User Account.
Doing Otherwise would bring over the the Issue that existed at the time the Backup was created.
You are welcome than thank you too.
Should the User ( you ) need any additional assistance on both Creating a Bootable Installer Drive and the tested Method to Wipe the Drive totally 100% Clean all Data, please do not hesitant to reach out via a reply to this posting.
EDITED
OMG, etresoft, you made my day!
(I’m still chuckling.)
So, you don’t get banned for saying things like that? hmmm…
I must learn your clever, covertly subversive ways, oh wise one.
Regarding local snapshots, is there a particularly good reason to not disable those? To me, local snapshots seem like an excellent way to wear out your SSD and slow your computer. That’s in addition to tricking owners into believing they’re out of space, and thus need a “new and improved” Mac. In fact, the 256GB SSD died last year in my old 2015 MBP. But they say every cloud has a silver lining, and a dead SSD led me to discover M.2 SSDs. Did you know you can put up to 4TB in an old MacBook Pro or Air? I can personally attest to the fact that it works great. 👍
System Data taking up almost 200GB, how can I tell where it is coming from?
