MacBook Air storage or anomaly

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Level 1

9 points

MacBook Air storage or anomaly

(MacBook Air running Sonoma 14.6.1)

I'm using 237 of 245 available GB on the laptop, so I'm looking for what I can purge. When I go to system settings / general / storage it shows that I have almost 97 GB of documents. But when I click the info button to get a list of documents and their sizes, there are nowhere near 97 GB of documents. It has around 10 GB. Even if you include the application apps folder, it still only adds up to around 50GB.

What could be creating that high GB number? I added a screenshot of the storage summary below, in case seeing what else is taking up space helps with understanding what is going on.

(There is a second profile on the computer, but there are almost no documents or files under it -- definitely under 1 GB. I have plenty of room on iCloud and I am backing up everything. I am syncing documents, and I have optimize Mac storage turned on.)

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 14.6

Posted on Feb 18, 2025 10:43 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

D.I. Johnson

Level 8

36,847 points

Feb 18, 2025 2:38 PM in response to zanzen

Documents can include much more than simply those files found in the "Documents" folder. It can include other files scattered about the drive in other folders and locations in your home folder, including Pages docs, .PDFs, pics and vids. Can't tell you 'why' Apple allows this discrepancy.

Please see the following guidance from Apple on the subject:

Find and delete files on your Mac - Apple Support

❝The Documents category contains files in your home folder that aren’t included in other categories, such as Pages documents and PDFs. It also includes videos and photos that aren’t managed by your photo library (for example, an image that a friend shares with you using AirDrop). ❞

I understand also that the accuracy of the Storage calculations can be "off" to a great degree and that the calculations provided by Disk Utility may be more accurate overall.

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Answer 2

Feb 18, 2025 11:07 AM in response to zanzen

“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”.

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 application 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 and empty the trash. 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 on Mac - Apple Support

Finally, consider using optimized storage to keep files available on the iCloud drive and off your Mac's internal drive.

Optimize storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

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Answer 3

zanzen Author

Level 1

9 points

Feb 18, 2025 1:03 PM in response to D.I. Johnson

I had already done nearly all of this. I checked the couple of things here I had not done, and there was nothing taking up significant space.

My question remains about the documents folder. Why is there this big mismatch? 97 GB is a huge amount of documents, and there are only around 10 GBs worth in the list that come up by clicking the "info" (an i with a circle around it.) button next to documents in the storage list. Why would it say 97GB when there only about 10GB of data in documents? I also looked directly in the documents folder under my profile, and there is not 97GB of stuff in there. What I see there matches up with the document lists that come up within the storage list in system settings.

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MacBook Air storage or anomaly

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