Level 2

378 points

System Storage Taking Up Way Too Much Space in macOS Sierra

I've encountered a problem on my brand new MacBook, but haven't been able to find a solution after working on it for most of today. In a nutshell: When I go to "About This Mac > Storage" the System files were taking up a whopping 90+ GB of my hard drive. Here is a screen shot:

I also noticed that, unlike on my wife's MacBook Pro, I had no individual listing for iTunes. I could reach the iTunes folder through Documents on the left side, but the contents of the folder were grayed out. As an experiment, I copied then deleted my entire iTunes Library from within iTunes. After I did that, my Storage report looked like this:

Now the System files are down around 8 GB. (The Documents content jumped up dramatically because I copied my iTunes Library to the Desktop.) Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to establish the separate entry for iTunes in this window. When I move things back into iTunes, they count again toward the System storage amount. And I still don't have a separate iTunes entry.

I would like to be a huge fan of Optimized Storage, but this set-up of counting iTunes media as "system files" seems problematic. And I have no idea why it reports storage content accurately on my wife's Mac but not mine. Unfortunately Apple Support was not very helpful when I contacted them this afternoon. The agent suggested reinstalling macOS Sierra, which I did, but it didn't solve the problem. Some help would be appreciated, Apple!

MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2016), macOS Sierra (10.12)

Posted on Sep 25, 2016 1:24 PM

169 replies

Mar 25, 2018 4:35 PM in response to jlsolomon

Good point.

Hopefully, this will help some folks:

My Time Machine backup is on an external hard drive so that was not the issue for me. My Macbook's space consumption problem was that Carbonite and Adobe Premier (the video editing software) were hogging major GBs.

I moved the Adobe files to my external hard drive. For Carbonite, I routinely use Omnidisk Sweeper to clear the temporary files which can use hundreds of GB of space.

Good luck, everyone! I hope this helps.

Aug 14, 2018 2:49 AM in response to bindex

I had this problem too but how I freed up some space from my system was pretty simple.

1-First open up Finder

2-Second click on Go on the top

3-Hold down alt/option button and select library

4-sort through the files and look for unwanted files and delete them.

I figured this out while installing a map on Terraria. LOL

Apr 3, 2019 12:35 PM in response to bindex

I fixed this. My system storage was over 100GB. After running disk daisy as a system admin, I found that nearly 80GB were in the hidden Document Revisions folder - which I think is just old autosaved versions of garage band or other apps. After doing more research that told me not to just up and delete those folders, I downloaded Onyx (https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/release_onyx.html) and ran the maintenance, including selecting automatically saved versions of documents and I got almost all 80GB of space back. Onyx download was free. I literally just did this so hopefully my computer won't crash in a few days but all is well for the moment!

Feb 14, 2017 11:54 AM in response to Nylabeecuzz

Glad I could help. 🙂

Feb 15, 2017 9:37 AM in response to greydog77

It was a little buggy for me, would close unexpectedly or freeze, it also took several tries to delete all of the excess files in fsCachedData. BUT IT WORKED!!

May 5, 2017 6:54 AM in response to I2re

This Made it for me! After so long, Thanks a bunch. it was a screenflow back up for me that was 63G alone !

rb21

Level 1

4 points

May 22, 2017 5:05 AM in response to bindex

For me, OmniDiskSweeper helped. Parallels was creating logs like there was no tomorrow. Deleted the logs and everything is fine. I recovered around 200+ GB from "System"..

Jul 4, 2017 1:59 PM in response to dtsgddtsgd

This worked for me, thank you. Despite saying the user folder was 12kb or something, it freed up 40+GB when I moved it to the trash and deleted it there.

jacelin

Level 1

4 points

Jul 7, 2017 8:12 AM in response to bindex

My system space was a bunch of core dump files.

Jul 15, 2017 11:17 PM in response to bindex

So you copied your iTunes folder into documents and then deleted that?

Jul 19, 2017 1:01 PM in response to bindex

It seems that it is your back ups from your devices on itunes ,same thing happened to me and it ended up being all my phone back ups on itunes.Hope this helps

Mokello

Level 1

18 points

Aug 3, 2017 2:37 AM in response to shioma

i can't access this post 😟

Aug 3, 2017 8:41 AM in response to Mokello

IPhone4 to slow

Aug 4, 2017 2:49 AM in response to bindex

IPhone 4 extremely slow help and support ??

Aug 4, 2017 8:05 AM in response to watsonandhardy

How did you delete it? I'm having a similar issue but can't figure out how to delete please help! Thanks

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

System Storage Taking Up Way Too Much Space in macOS Sierra