My Mac Studio 2022 (macOS Tahoe 26.2) system data is at 1.75 TB You read that correctly. I have next to nothing on my hard drive & have run Cleanmymac numerous times to empty caches etc. My storage shows 1.97TB of 2 TB used.
What in gods name would be taking up this much space? And can anyone walk me through how to figure this out?
TIA
Stefanie
Mac Studio, macOS 26.2
If you've automatic Time Machine backups enabled, but do not keep a backup drive connected to your Mac all the time, then MacOS creates and keeps a number of Time Machine snapshots on the drive as part of the backup process. TM snapshots can occupy a significant amount of drive space. You can disable the creation of these many TM snapshots by setting TM to backup manually rather than automatically at intervals.
About Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support
You can view and manage these in Disk Utility or in the Terminal app.
View APFS Snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
If you've automatic Time Machine backups enabled, but do not keep a backup drive connected to your Mac all the time, then MacOS creates and keeps a number of Time Machine snapshots on the drive as part of the backup process. TM snapshots can occupy a significant amount of drive space. You can disable the creation of these many TM snapshots by setting TM to backup manually rather than automatically at intervals.
About Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support
You can view and manage these in Disk Utility or in the Terminal app.
View APFS Snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
the first thing you should do is completely remove CleanMyMac, and never install it again.
once that is done use this article for more insight:
How to free up ‘System Data’ and other st… - Apple Community
If after following all the usual suggestions and no help then you would need to boot into recovery, erase the drive then reinstall the OS and migrate your files back. This usually lowers the system data number by quite a bit.
Can you explain why Cleanmymac is bad / should be removed?
my system data was 1.76tb before I downloaded that app.
I've done everything that the article states, as well as starting up in Safe Mode & NOTHING works.
Mac Studio system data using 1.75 TB of storage
