Storage on a Mac Book Pro
My storage is almost full, system data takes up 312.31GB of a 500GB drive. How do i reduce this?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 14.3
Question marked as
"System Data" (or “Other”) storage is an amalgam of files that don’t easily fall into the defined categories of “Audio" “Movies” “Photos” “Apps” and “Backups”. The types of files found in “System Data" would include: • miscellaneous system files, • temporary files, • app plugins and extensions, • browser and email caches, • documents like .pdf, .psd, .doc, • disk images and archives like .dmg, .tar, .zip
You can’t directly manage the contents of this category. That is done by macOS. The category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac.
What you can do...
• Empty the Trash in the Dock.
• Empty the trash in the Photos app.
• Delete unused and unneeded installers from your downloads folder and desktop.
• Reboot your Mac at least weekly.
• Transfer files that you don’t use daily to an external drive and then delete them from the startup drive. Files that take up the most room are movies, images and music.
• Force Time Machine to delete local snapshots:
About Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support
• Use Disk Utility to delete APFS snapshots:
View APFS snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
This from Apple on the subject of storage management:
Free up storage space - Apple Support
And this for a better, more thorough explanation:
What is “Other” and what can I do about it? - Apple Community (Kappy)
You can also use apps such as DaisyDisk from Software Ambience (also available in the App Store) or OmniDiskSweeper from Omni Labs. (I’m unaffiliated with both.)
Once you've located these larger user files, you can relocate them to another drive and/or delete them if they aren't needed.