System data croaking my iMac

I'm getting constant messages that my disk is too full. Lately Mail has been crashing because it has no space to put anything. I've got an iMac with 500G of disk space, running Monterey 12.5.1. It appears the culprit is "System Data," which is taking up over 400G of the 500G total available space. (It's the gray bar on the screen shot below. Next-biggest (red) is Applications at 37G; goes down from there, but all others seem reasonable.) I'm guessing it's not normal for System Data to consume 80% of all available disk space. I've tried all the usual things Apple tells you to do do free up space, but none of it deals with System Data. So, any help in getting this number down considerably would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

iMac 24″, macOS 12.5

Posted on May 26, 2023 5:20 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 26, 2023 5:37 PM

Where it says it is cannot be trusted, at least I haven't seen where these Files are in System when this occurs.


The only sure cure I've seen is to Carbon Copy Clone to a new drive then clone back. Seems to skip some temporary files.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html


But a few suggestions to look at... Have you emptied the trash lately?


You may find neuroanatomist's User Tip helpful: What is "Other" storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out? - Apple Community. 


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


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 ** -hx | sort -h 


sudo ** -hx ~/| sort -h 



Similar questions

3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 26, 2023 5:37 PM in response to phd67

Where it says it is cannot be trusted, at least I haven't seen where these Files are in System when this occurs.


The only sure cure I've seen is to Carbon Copy Clone to a new drive then clone back. Seems to skip some temporary files.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html


But a few suggestions to look at... Have you emptied the trash lately?


You may find neuroanatomist's User Tip helpful: What is "Other" storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out? - Apple Community. 


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


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 ** -hx | sort -h 


sudo ** -hx ~/| sort -h 



May 27, 2023 9:18 AM in response to BDAqua

Thank you. Tried some of this, with marginal results. Stopped short of the Carbon Copy clone idea and called Apple. They said best bet is a reinstall of the OS, as if it was a new computer. That seems similar to the clone, albeit a bit more drastic. So I guess I'll try that....at some point... Other ideas welcome. Thanks again.

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System data croaking my iMac

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