Large *.journal files - can I safely remove them

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Level 1

8 points

Large *.journal files - can I safely remove them

Seems like the internal systems of my Mac are just eating up memory. I remove 5 Gigs one day and a few days later it is eaten up again by some internal program. I see these files "evt_journalAttr_E621AA31-068A-44C8-B3C1-CC784C19D341_911458898_2852.journal" under some type of Spotlight Event directory that are taking up 28Gigs of Disk space. Is that normal? What crisis will I cause if I remove some of these files that were created six months ago. Anyone gone through this issue, and can recommend a good solution on hidden files to remove?

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 15.0

Posted on May 22, 2025 2:57 PM

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Answer 1

Fox999 Author

Level 1

8 points

May 23, 2025 2:12 PM in response to leroydouglas

I actually removed these and I did not experience any issues and freed up 30G of storage. However in the past 24 hours 15G of storage was taken up by something else. I can't understand how an OS can just grab 15G of storage for something. It's like some developer said "They won't miss it". We will just grab a chunk of disk space.

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Answer 2

leroydouglas

Level 10

200,766 points

May 22, 2025 4:20 PM in response to Fox999

Fox999 wrote:

Seems like the internal systems of my Mac are just eating up memory. I remove 5 Gigs one day and a few days later it is eaten up again by some internal program. I see these files "evt_journalAttr_E621AA31-068A-44C8-B3C1-CC784C19D341_911458898_2852.journal" under some type of Spotlight Event directory that are taking up 28Gigs of Disk space. Is that normal? What crisis will I cause if I remove some of these files that were created six months ago. Anyone gone through this issue, and can recommend a good solution on hidden files to remove?

where exactly is this...?

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