Drive Full with System Data

Hello Gals and Guys -


I have a 2018 Mac Mini that I use mainly to surf and watch videos. I keep my video files mostly on the external hard drive, so I was surprised when I got a Drive Almost Full dialog box yesterday. I realized I had a 10GB of YouTube files on the main drive, but the only other sizable folder I put on there was my music, which is about 5GB. I moved my YouTube videos to the external drive, but my drive went from 117GB to 118GB afterwards. After doing a little research I figured out most of the hard drive, 86GB of 121GB, is from the System Data. I don't know what is, but since it's been collected while I've been using my Mac, I wouldn't think I'd need it, so is there some way to purge or whittle it down? Thanks for any help.

Mac mini (2018)

Posted on Jun 1, 2023 1:25 PM

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Posted on Jun 2, 2023 12:46 PM

Thanks BDAqua. I appreciate the help. The What is "Other" storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out? - Apple Community idea got me pointed in the right direction. I found a free application, OmniDiskSweeper, that showed me what was taking up all the space. I've been using the AppleTV application to beam video files to my AppleTV and it stored a copy on the internal SSD, which since it's small filled up quickly. OmniDiskSweeper also allowed me to delete the files as well and I'm guessing I'll doing it periodically again in the future. I'm down from 118GB of 121GB full to a more reasonable 37GB. Thanks again.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 2, 2023 12:46 PM in response to BDAqua

Thanks BDAqua. I appreciate the help. The What is "Other" storage on a Mac, and how can I clean it out? - Apple Community idea got me pointed in the right direction. I found a free application, OmniDiskSweeper, that showed me what was taking up all the space. I've been using the AppleTV application to beam video files to my AppleTV and it stored a copy on the internal SSD, which since it's small filled up quickly. OmniDiskSweeper also allowed me to delete the files as well and I'm guessing I'll doing it periodically again in the future. I'm down from 118GB of 121GB full to a more reasonable 37GB. Thanks again.

Jun 2, 2023 9:33 AM in response to fredgarvins

We cannot trust the Storage report as to where the usage really is, especially what “Other” or “system” is…


And apparently Apple has a new way of hiding files & more than a few find out the only way is to Backup, then Erase the Drive, or clone then clone back which seems to leave some huge temporary files behind!?


Carbon Copy Cloner seems to accomplish it...


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)


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 

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Drive Full with System Data

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