System Storage Taking Up Way Too Much Space in macOS Sierra

I'm having the SAME issues on masOS Sierra! It's quite frustrating and slows me down from doing A LOT. Very time consuming. I can't free up any space on my phone until I free up stolen/hidden space on the mac 😠. Plus, most of my photos/videos don't transfer to my external hard drive from iphoto. VERY frustrating! They need to fix this problem ASAP!

I know this thread is old, but when sweeping my disk, I found a ridiculous amount of my system storage was being taken up by system diagnostics, under Users>library>logs>crashreporter>mobiledevice, within which was the name of my iPhone, only taking up 200 Mb, and another "iPhone" followed by a bunch of random numbers/letters. Under that was diagnosticlogs>sysdiagnose> and then hundreds of system diagnostics reports I had never known existed. Obviously I was wondering if for whatever reason there should be 70+ gigs of random, unrecognized, iPhone system diagnostics, and if these are at all necessary. Please let me know if I can go ahead and clear this from my drive or if it is an essential thing to keep.

Thanks

Your welcome, but you might want to keep an eye on those two locations just in case their size gets out of hand again. Still can't figure how diagnostic files can get so big but with iPhone/iPad backups it's all too easy, especially if multiple versions are created for whatever reason.

If you start seeing your iDevice diagnostics (i.e. CrashReporter) increase in size again to the same degree as before you might want to consider restoring your device via iTunes, mainly because the logs on your Mac are initially generated by the iDevise and dumped to the computer during each syncing process. A restore might fix what ever is causing the issues that create said logs, worth a try anyhow.

Regarding iDevice backups, just keep an eye via iTunes Preferences/Devices section, it's all too easy for these to get created, either when updating the device software, restoring or simply when connected and deciding to manually create another backup yourself.

Lastly, try not to go mad and remove everything, having a current backup is important just in case an issue arises and you have to resort to restoring the devise, the backup then allows you to get the device back to how you originally had it setup, some will keep more than one though, just in case the first gets corrupted - having a few logs can just help in trying to trouble shoot issues.

I saw same problem because i use core dump which store core files when an app crash, check under your root folder - /cores, if you see a lot of files, follow the post below:

https://blog.liplex.de/disable-core-file-dumps-on-mac/

I have the same issue. The problem came out of know where. Please help!

I have the same exact problem, mine is just over 370+ GB and I cannot seem to figure out how to purge it.. this is insane

System was up to 100GB on my MacBook but deleting the "hidden" Adobe cache freed up 70! Thank you dianeoforegon!

After restarting into safe mode and then shutting the computer all the way down then starting back up my System Storage went down to 49.81GB

My system is up to 356 GB and rising! I cannot delete enough files or move them to an external hard drive to make a difference 😟 ... Did you get a response as to how to fix this?

I did this with all users on my Macbook. No luck. I got the same results. My system storage is at 339.63.

Any other thoughts on what i can do?

Not sure WHY it's happening but the solution is: Get CLEANMYMAC - free app - it scans all your files to identify extraneous and unnecessary files and it instantly and reliably and very simply gets rid of them. Graphic look of app happens to be great as well.

Hey there,

So basically for me I discovered that once i uninstalled an app (move the app to the trash and then empty) my available storage remained constant. Hence you need to properly uninstall your apps because on a mac it is not completely deleted when you do the normal process of moving it to trash and emptying. So click on your desktop (default finder 'app') and click on go. Then click on Library. There you will have a lot of folders. For me I clicked on the folders: Application scripts and Application Logs. There I saw a lot of folders containing apps/games I had deleted already. So basically I moved these folders to the trash and emptied it. My system storage has cleared up drastically and now I have a couple 100 GB free. This worked out for me so I hope it works for ya'll 🙂 PS also make sure yo uare careful when deleting files from the library as some of them are vital for your system All the best guys!

Mine was using nearly a TB in System. After time with support and much googling, I believe to have resolved it; at least for my case.

If you are using the new file system, APFS, the Time Machine local snapshots show up as used space in system. These should show as purgeable and will automatically clear themselves as needed to clear up space. So far, the only way I found to see these files is using the command 'tmutil listlocalsnapshots' and it doesn't show the sizes. It shows a list of snapshots which each look like com.apple.TimeMachine.2017-12-20-014617. I deleted several of these using a command like this for each 'tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2017-12-20-014617' and that reduced my used disk space and the disk space in system to what I expected.

this probably sounds dumb but if i were to delete my users folder which takes up 89gb would that delete all the info off of my laptop? i assume that it wouldYour User's folder contains all your personal data. You have to create another admin user in order to delete your User.

This is not a dumb question, but it does indicate to me that you are a very basic user. A drastic action of deleting a user is not something you would do unless you have a backup of your data.

I'm not seeing a previous post from you that describes your problem. If system storage taking up too much space is your problem, I suggest you ignore this. If you look back over this long discussion you will see that under “About this Mac” > Storage is not a true representation of what is actually on your drive. If the temp files take up too much space, your Mac will delete when it gets low on storage.

If your problem is more complex than system storage, then I suggest you create a new post describing your issue. Post a link to your new post here so we can be sure to follow-up.

Writing an effective Apple Support Communities question

Wanna share the end of my Story: I also was someone with macOS High Sierra taking up all my space on the HD. Because no solution came up - even with contact of support, i decided to freshly set up my mac. the odysee started, i got errors after error during the installation. at the end brought the mac to the store - they set it up with mac OS High Sierra. At home I took hours of time to reinstall all my apps - then something in an update went wrong. mac down again - at the end they had to change the motherboard - costed me several hundred bucks...

Hope you are more lucky...