System data is 518GB on a 1TB drive!
Mac mini 3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5. I switched Time Machine backups to manual. My Dropbox for macOS is on File Provider. I also have Google Drive. Not sure what is going on.
Mac mini, macOS 13.5
Part 1 of 2
How to delete Time Machine snapshots on your Mac.
Often caused if the Time Machine Drive has not been attached to the computer and TM Backup is set to run on a Schedule.
TM Backup will make Snap Shot on the Internal Drive awaiting the TM Backup Drive to be attached.
Only then will the Snaps Shots be transferred to the External Drive and deleted the Internal Drive.
Part 2 of 2
Notation - If the user is using a cloning software like Carbon Copy Cloner - and https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/automated-maintenance-ccc-safetynet-folder suggest tweaking the Safety Net Feature in this software. It may be making additional Snap Shots that are not being Cloned to the Eternal Drive. If this should be the case, these Snap Shot could be using additional space on the drive
Before going into terminal I was able to check in with Apple Support. We started by clearing out caches and cookies and other things that sometimes cause system data bloat. We were also able to delete any Time Machine snapshots in Terminal, but it wasn’t logging any. It didn’t seem like Time Machine was the issue. We did a few rounds of this and then I recalled that I had updated my Dropbox recently. We found a gigantic file in system data that Dropbox had saved as a backup while they moved the Dropbox folder to a new location. This backup was the problem.
Thank you both for your help!
Look at the root of the hard drive. If you see temporary files from one of your backup sources, that's where the space has gone. You can click a folder, and select Get info in the file menu to verify the size of the folder.
I see nothing at the root. I wound up calling Apple support and so far no progress. The issue coincided with backing up to a Time Machine drive for the first time in a long time. The external drive I was backing up to is the same size as my computer's SSD (1 TB). It was a newly reformatted drive. Time machine is showing an error that only 22% of the backup was complete. I believe time machine is storing snapshots or backups somewhere and I cannot access them. FWIW, I don't need the versioned backups at this point and would be fine with a single, most recent backup copy. Not sure if it would solve the issue, but I may get a larger external drive for Time Machine backup and see if that works.
Welcome
Gigantic System Data problem - 518 GB
