MacOS 27 will solve System Data bloat???

steve626 wrote:

tbirdvet wrote:

External drive increased my system data and I have no other items that would cause this. I made no changes between OS26 and OS27. I show a difference of >10GB with my external TB5 drive on vs off.

Is that external drive also being backed up along with the internal drive, to a separate Time Machine drive? If so, there may be snapshots being generated from that external drive's contents and those snapshots might be included in the "System Data" accounting bin.

Or maybe all of the storage on your Mac is listed, and since it’s not being indexed, it’s all “System Data”. I pretty much doubt that, though, because I have several TB of attached storage and my System Data hovers around 60GB. I’ll have to see if I have any of it excluded. I’m pretty sure most of it is indexed, but I’ve backup drives (for the externals) that are excluded.

For those that see the drop, does it correspond to the data stored on the drive.

Barney-15E wrote:

steve626 wrote:

tbirdvet wrote:

External drive increased my system data and I have no other items that would cause this. I made no changes between OS26 and OS27. I show a difference of >10GB with my external TB5 drive on vs off.

Is that external drive also being backed up along with the internal drive, to a separate Time Machine drive? If so, there may be snapshots being generated from that external drive's contents and those snapshots might be included in the "System Data" accounting bin.

Or maybe all of the storage on your Mac is listed, and since it’s not being indexed, it’s all “System Data”. I pretty much doubt that, though, because I have several TB of attached storage and my System Data hovers around 60GB. I’ll have to see if I have any of it excluded. I’m pretty sure most of it is indexed, but I’ve backup drives (for the externals) that are excluded.

For those that see the drop, does it correspond to the data stored on the drive.

Barney-15E -- here's what I see on my MacBook Pro 16" Intel on Tahoe 26.7.1:

This laptop has a 1 TB internal drive. I connected two external drives, a 1 TB and 2 TB drives. Neither are used for Time Machine (those are two additional drives that were not connected for this experiment). Both are indexed.

Two external drives connected (1 TB and 2 TB)

1 TB internal drive shows in Disk Utility

518 GB available

485 GB free

33 GB purgeable

Storage Tool System Data: 49 GB

No drives connected

1 TB internal drive shows in Disk Utility

517 GB available

484 GB free

33 GB purgeable

Storage Tool System Data: 49 GB

Same System Data with or without external drives connected. All drives are indexed. (I don't understand the 1 GB of disagreement between the two cases for "free space" but assume that is not pertinent.)

etresoft wrote:

This is like people arguing over whether the Game of Thrones characters are more accurately depicted in the TV show or the books.

About something no one here understands. That’s why we have the long ongoing dissertations.

This. Thanks for telling us buying a new Mac is not a solution. I have a 1TB hard drive on a 2021 MacBook pro. Most of my files are in iCloud. That's because I have about 800GB of work sitting there. I have gotten to the point of turning iCloud off to see what happens. I gained all of 62GB on my internal hard drive. This seems to happen with and without optimization. My user account has me at about 550GB, but when I examine individual files, I see maybe 50 GB. WHERE IS THE BLOAT? I can literally wake up and see files are consumed so the Macbook can't scan, work, etc. Or move files to an external. I've seen I am not alone. I purged iMazing for my phone backup to see if it was that. Nope. What is frustrating is I have flown out of state to do some WORK and can't do basic operations because my internal hard drive is full. I can't use my externals because my hard drive is too FULL. I will purge/move whatever to gain space. But no. This is so frustrating!!!!

etresoft wrote:

This is like people arguing over whether the Game of Thrones characters are more accurately depicted in the TV show or the books.

A lot of people post questions here about what their Mac's Storage Tool shows (System Data especially) and since Apple hasn't really documented it, folks here are trying to understand it. Maybe simply a lost cause, as you have advised before.

Random comment: I have noticed that on my iPhone and Apple Watch (Series 11), there is also "System Data" shown but it is a very tiny fraction of total usage.

By the way, I think the book depictions are probably more accurate than the TV show.

mhb wrote:

I use Time Machine on an external hard drive and learned not to turn iCloud optimization on or the Time Machine backup will only include placeholders of all the content stored on iCloud until it's called up for service. Not sure if something like this is affecting what you can do and can't do, depending which storage you're trying to access your files from.

Backups normally back up only files that are physical on your Mac. When you move those files to cloud storage, they are no longer physically on your Mac and are no longer backed up. This can be a trap when people think they have backups but those backups do not include cloud stored files, which can be accidentally deleted or damaged or corrupted and then there is no backup.

One exception to this is that Carbon Copy Cloner is a backup tool that can back up cloud stored files, if the user instructs it to. It does this by temporarily downloading each cloud stored file, backing it up, and then removing it from local storage. As you might imagine, this could take a lot of time and backup storage space.

steve626 wrote:

A lot of people post questions here about what their Mac's Storage Tool shows (System Data especially) and since Apple hasn't really documented it, folks here are trying to understand it.

Absolutely. Can't blame them. It's a fancy user interface displaying lots of important-looking numbers. Some guy on the internet keeps saying it's nonsense. But why would Apple do that? Doesn't make sense.

Random comment: I have noticed that on my iPhone and Apple Watch (Series 11), there is also "System Data" shown but it is a very tiny fraction of total usage.

Not random at all. Many aspects of iOS work great on iPhones, but not so well on the Mac.

By the way, I think the book depictions are probably more accurate than the TV show.

But we can all agree that both are a poor attempt to copy Tolkien's work. The books, I mean. Don't get me started on the movies.

Barney-15E wrote:

That is interesting, but I thought mhb was still on Tahoe.

👍

Matti Haveri wrote:

Good experiment. If it makes any difference, were the external volumes Spotlight-indexed?

All the external volumes are excluded from Spotlight indexing.

This is like people arguing over whether the Game of Thrones characters are more accurately depicted in the TV show or the books.

I have the same issue, basically my MacBook Pro is now unusable....