Level 1

81 points

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

JethLaq

Level 1

42 points

Posted on Mar 13, 2025 7:08 PM

With the help of Apple support and many hours of troubleshooting and diagnostics we were able to identify the problem and regain the disk space from System Data. The culprit in my case was Carbon Copy Cloner a backup and disk cloning utility of which a snapshot was occupying 416GB of disk space when it should not have been.

To get rid of this I booted into recovery mode while holding "Command & R" while starting the computer

Ran Disk Utility and selected View > Show APFS Snapshots > selected the snapshot and deleted it.

Upon restart my disk usage was somewhat back to normal. I have a 1TB drive and used space was 444GB but Available space said 998GB. Clearly there was some lingering calculation challenges but Apple said that would sort itself out in time or would update correctly if an OS update was done.

Sure enough after I updated to Sequoia 15.3.2 everything appears to be back to normal.

Fingers crossed that things remain that way and hopefully this may help some of you also experiencing this issue!

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72 replies

Feb 11, 2025 11:53 AM in response to TechSiren

How exactly can one do that?

Feb 12, 2025 9:43 AM in response to DGaryC

What about just going back to Catalina?

dkind123

Level 1

14 points

Mar 6, 2025 8:49 AM in response to DGaryC

Has this been answered? I have the same issue

JethLaq

Level 1

42 points

Mar 6, 2025 6:57 PM in response to JethLaq

I just unchecked all SpotLight indexing selections, restarted my system and Data usage grew by another 40GB to now being 701.6GB on a 1TB drive.

SDWrites

Level 1

8 points

Apr 3, 2025 7:59 PM in response to DGaryC

Same problem here. M1, Sequoia.

Apr 14, 2025 6:39 AM in response to vijayhardaha

Helps me to free up a space from 20gb to 380 on my 500gb SSD. Thanks a lot!

Kenjhee

Level 1

4 points

Apr 16, 2025 12:56 PM in response to SDWrites

Same. M1, Sequoia. All of a sudden I noticed system data was 200GB of my 500GB hard drive. As I was reading this forum what to do, it magically dropped to 20GB all by itself! WTH?

Apr 18, 2025 2:29 PM in response to vijayhardaha

M2 MacBook Pro Sequoia 15.4.1 here. Thank you very much for this fix. It saved me over 200GB of space on my drive!

May 13, 2025 6:17 AM in response to tbirdvet

Not exactly, when I reboot I get 80-100 GB back, at least for an hour or two

Feb 3, 2025 5:39 PM in response to BenGott

Hey, I'm struggling with this same issue right now. 320GB of my 500GB drive is system data. Did you figure something out in the last few months? I've tried what others have suggested; putting my drive into private on spotlight and erasing the index files but it didn't seem to make a difference.

Each time I clear out space, the system data just takes up more.

tbirdvet

Level 6

17,783 points

Mar 3, 2025 4:19 AM in response to Kimmers333

I have found that one can boot into recovery on the Mac, erase the drive and reinstall the OS which will reset the system data file much lower but will again increase over time. I have done this on 3 Macs and works every time.

tbirdvet

Level 6

17,783 points

May 13, 2025 6:00 AM in response to mackemmagic

You would need to erase your drive and reinstall the OS to see the storage reduced any appreciable amount.

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MacOS Sequoia filling up with system data