I've recently gotten notifications that my MacBook Pro 256GB hard drive is nearly full. I've tried to figure out why this is happening and checked General in System Settings. It's currently telling me that my System Data file includes 136.76GB of data. I'm not sure what information this includes and why it's so big. Is there any way to reduce it to save some storage space?
“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
Also, please see the following guidance from Apple on the subject:
“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
Also, please see the following guidance from Apple on the subject:
Thanks! Super helpful.
You're welcome.
MacBook Pro System Data file is huge
