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

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Posted on Jan 4, 2025 4:43 AM

I had the humongous System Data issue about a week ago (90MB of free space?!) and solved by 2 actions:

First deleting the offending cache* at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/Data/Library/Caches.

Next I upgraded to Sequoia 15.2, where apparently this cache over-filling is solved.

No problems now.

*in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mediaanalysisd one of the directories was humongous and filled 99.9% of free space. Go and check that directory in your ~/Library and by size it's immediately clear. Delete the oversize directory, and upgrade to MacOS 15.2 directly after that.

I could not upgrade to 15.2 prior to clearing this cache because, no free space...

I noticed this issue some weeks after upgrading to Sequoia, it probably appeared in Sequoia 15.1.

(the system had been creating a new mediaanalysisd cache file of 64MB probably every hour or so, without ever deleting the older ones. I saw an endless list of these 64MB files... On its own that sounds a small file, but in the end filled some hundreds of GB in that cache)

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MacOS Sequoia filling up with system data

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