MacOS Sequoia filling up with system data

I have a 2023 Mac Studio M2 with 1 TB SSD and a week ago there was 600GB of free space. I updated Adobe CC yesterday and when I reopened After Effects I got the message that I didn't have enough disk space for the cache. I checked and there was only 90GB free space. I then restarted the machine, deleted the Adobe cache (6gb), deleted my Time Machine snapshots, deleted all the other caches. I ended up with 258GB of free space. A check of the storage list shows that I still have 492GB of system data and I can't get rid of it.

Any suggestions?

Mac Studio, macOS 15.0

Posted on Oct 17, 2024 12:49 PM

Top-ranking reply

albk691

Level 1

20 points

Posted on Oct 22, 2024 1:41 PM

I'm also drowning in (428GB of) System Data. It seems it doesn't even matter if I'm removing other files from my laptop, I'm not getting any space back.

What seems even weirder is that I can't seem to find where these 400GB are hiding...

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35 replies

bulan34

Level 1

13 points

Dec 2, 2024 9:24 AM in response to DGaryC

For me this directory, /Users/abc/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts, is 24 G. How is that handled?

AlWeir

Level 4

3,591 points

Dec 6, 2024 7:07 AM in response to TechSiren

I hardly store anything on iCloud other than mobile backups for the devices I run.

BerndXL

Level 1

15 points

Dec 6, 2024 11:02 AM in response to BerndXL

..Firmlinks came with Catalina..

Dec 9, 2024 1:23 PM in response to iBookmaster

Yes, that’s right. Safe mode also clears system caches which is a part of the system data storage. You can manually delete this folder as well under your user library.

Atomss77

Level 1

32 points

Dec 19, 2024 8:15 PM in response to DGaryC

This is a common issue and no easy way to delete. The system data grows with time. One effective way is to delete the app caches.

MacOS Sequoia filling up with system data