70% of hard drive Full of OS data??!

none of the stuff suggested did anything to find the source.

However, i figured it out myself. Bought some software to Clean up excessive file storage for $10 and found some huge text files in my Mail data. I deleted just one and freed up 180 GB of memory.

SO, now I have one more question when you get back available about this file and others too.

Wondering if you can help me understand WHY? something like this is being generated by my Mac's Mail program?

I have about 10 more like this that will free up 60% of my hard drive space. Planning to delete the rest also.

Details:

In the file system here: users/me/Library/Containers/Mail/Data/Library/Logs/Mail

.txt files, all of them; ALL file names start with an IP address (122.0.1.1) + 40 or 50 characters; info from years of transactions in mail;

Excerpt:

"READ Mar 25 10:47:31.312 [kCFStreamSocketSecurityLevelNone] -- host:127.0.0.1 -- port:1143 -- socket:0x600002130d20 -- thread:0x600001b38500

1.593 OK Begin TLS negotiation now

WROTE Mar 25 10:47:31.321 [kCFStreamSocketSecurityLevelTLSv1_2] -- host:127.0.0.1 -- port:1143 -- socket:0x600002130d20 -- thread:0x600001b38500

2.593 CAPABILITY"

Ok did as suggested:

-- rebooted in SAFE mode and tried to follow 1st instructions to update OS(at 14.0; upgrade req'd to 14.2), but not enough disk space available when trying to upgrade.

-- went through a variety of things to dump data to allow upgrade

-- successful and upgraded. However, NOW,

got message when trying to simply open Brave browser that it was damaged and had two choices: move it to trash or cancel(cancelled!) AND still have HUGE level of OS system data and I noticed while in system settings and watching the amount of space in that category, it was rising at a rate of 0.01 GB(10MB?) per second!

So I am watching as my free space is being whittled away!

What is going on, man oh man!

Looking forward to more fine assistance! thanks in advance.

. . . and Merry Christmas by the way.

from 1st response, in ERROR:

" . . . and watching the amount of space in that category, it was rising at a rate of 0.01 GB(10MB?) per second!

So I am watching as my free space is being whittled away!

What is going on, man oh man!"

revise to: . . . not changing dynamically, settled out to 337 GB, still huge.

about Brave. . . I think I was responsible for Brave "breaking". I saw in history that 88 tabs had been closed and tried to reopen them. . . Brave TRIED to but it took a long time and nothing opened so I used activity monitor to FORCE Brave closed. . . that must have killed the app somehow.