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

Top-ranking reply

ishadoe

Level 1

63 points

Posted on Feb 23, 2017 11:39 PM

You have to take into account all the other files on your Mac, not just iTunes.

For example the text messages on my iPhone determine the size of the backup my iPhone does on the cloud.

You need to look into how many notes you have and how many text you sent on the macbook. iTunes isn't the only thing taking up space in the system storage tab. It would also be easier for us to help if you submitted a screenshot of the actual Documents>iTunes folder so we can see the size of the folder. That will give us all the info we need to determine the issue. My library is taking up space on my MacBook Air mainly because I use Apple Music and the library takes up space if I use it on my MacBook. Some files are stored on the mac. When I went to my iTunes Music folder in Finder I found what was taking up all the space. It was a movie I purchased on my MacBook Air. One movie was taking up 7GB of data. Go into iTunes and find the movie then select remove download and you can see in the iTunes folder in finder where the folder was removed and the space is now back when I go to System Information. I can delete it and still watch it on all my devices because of the purchase history option. Now what is taking up all the space is a folder titled Album Artwork.

My iTunes Library on my iMac is 4,185 albums, 176 days, 435.37GB so I'd say I'm doing great for having that available on my MacBook Air anytime I want and the System Storage is only now 35.1GB.

Do some digging around in Finder and I'm sure you will find the file(s) taking up all your space. Till then submit the screenshot with more info on the breakdown of the files within iTunes and I'll be able to tell you where to look next. There are a lot of folders you will need to look into if iTunes is not the issue. For instance you will have to go into your Caches folder and see what is in there. There is a lot that can be done, but I don't want to list them all here and misdirect you when you probably don't need to go into these folders.

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169 replies

Nurlans

Level 1

4 points

Feb 11, 2018 2:18 PM in response to bindex

Copy/Paste the command below in Terminal. It purged 200GB+ from my System and put it back to normal size. The problem seems to be with Time Machine Local Snapshots:

tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 999999999999999

Apr 3, 2018 3:31 PM in response to tcobes

Yes, I have Adobe Photoshop and their video editing software, Premier Elements. Premier and Carbonite saved a lot of caching files!

I routinely delete the Carbonite caching files with Omnidisk Sweeper. For the Premier Elements, I now store those caching files on one of my external hard drives.

Jul 31, 2018 7:01 AM in response to bindex

I just deleted 30GB from the Apple Music folder of songs that were not showing up in iTunes. These look to be songs that were 'Deleted From Library' from the weekly recommended lists, but still kept files in the Apple Music folder. They seemed to take up storage space in 'System' versus 'Music', and I'm still not sure how to keep this from happening.

LpAtl

Level 1

8 points

Sep 18, 2018 6:51 PM in response to bindex

I used the omni thing and found my huge systems folder was actulay down the path of library to mail to some huge cahed files. I unlinked my email and then deleted so i did not lose any mail (not sure if i needed to do that or not). Now i have much more storage and my emails are still there when i log into gmail directly

Oct 2, 2018 4:22 PM in response to avongugg

Had a few conversations with senior tech support ninja who fixed the issue.

Seemed to be something with the './cores' area of system files, which stores logs and data from system or program crashes, or terminated processes. Or something like that. Seems my computer was holding on to all of these core dumps for some reason. Still have no idea how that could take up so much space so quickly, but my guy identified it, stopped the processes and deleted the folder. Now my system files are around 16GB and I have 772GB free for ....something else.

Kudos to Jim Siebert....

Nov 2, 2018 1:37 AM in response to bindex

I found a Onedrive temp folder of 130 Gb. It was here: SSD⁩ ▸ ⁨users ▸ ⁨me ▸ ⁨library ▸ ⁨Containers⁩ ▸ ⁨com.microsoft.OneDrive-mac⁩ ▸ ⁨Data⁩ ▸ ⁨Library⁩ ▸ ⁨Application Support⁩ ▸ ⁨OneDrive⁩⁩ ▸ ⁨tmp.
Deleting it freed up a lot of space, but onedrive immediately started filling it again.

Feb 22, 2019 1:52 AM in response to bindex

I also have faced this issue. I had lots of google backup files which i couldnt find very easily. Then I went to Task bar>Go>Go to folder and searched

~/Library/Application Support/

You may delete all unwanted files. I could free up almost 60 GB !!

It wont ham you even if you delete the entire folders. you may loose some saved passwords and files. Mac will restore other settings to the factory settings. Do it at your own risk if you are going for a complete delete

Mordeqai

Level 1

4 points

Mar 18, 2019 7:00 PM in response to bindex

Have you tried deleting items in the ~/Library/Caches directory. I had the same issue on my mac.

My mac has 500GB flash storage and i detected the same storage capacity problem.

I navigated to the caches folder and discovered the file size was quite big (around 330GB).

After deleting the contents from the cache folder i proceeded to restarting the mac. logged in and emptied the trash.

if you try emptying the recycle bin, the Finder app usually prompts you that "the files could not be deleted as it is in use"

Mvrdv

Level 1

4 points

Dec 4, 2017 3:19 PM in response to bindex

I had the same issue. After waiting 20-30 min it showed that the system was only 8 gb. Maybe it just needs time to sort the data.

Feb 26, 2018 1:42 PM in response to YoloMan1921

Try turning off Time Machine and see if that helps.

tcobes

Level 1

4 points

Apr 3, 2018 3:27 PM in response to bindex

Do you have any Adobe products on your computer? I had this problem and it was all my adobe preferences fault.

Zebadger

Level 1

4 points

Dec 28, 2017 2:52 PM in response to bindex

Just ran into this, too. Some was TM snapshots, but the real issue seems to be the way that HS Sys info is calculating "System":

When I run Sysinfo from my lean admin account, I get 410 GB "System" (Uggh). When I run it from my everyday user account, I get 220 GB "System" (now WHAT?).

As my iMac is multi-account, I have Photos and Lightroom DB in the Shared folder (close to 400 GB). Photos is about 190 GB in the System-Photo-DB... which Sysinfo shows as "Pictures" in my everyday user account... but not from my admin account (where I have not set up Photos)...

If I do the math, it kind-of stacks up and shows a user-confuser style of counting in Sysinfo. Apple: this is NOT the integrity of user-friendly systems I pay for, this is undergraduate level programming... but maybe they have the more competent staff engaged in tax evasion programming....

Jan 9, 2018 3:33 AM in response to Doover72

One thing I noticed is that any large change in what is on the disk will cause a large increase in the time machine local snapshots which show in that system space. It should show as recoverable, but you can verify whe

Jan 11, 2018 4:03 AM in response to ISeeItAll88

If you aren’t getting warnings about not having enough room to save your work, then you probably don’t have anything to worry about, but you can check one thing to be sure. When you look at the drive’s space, does it show you how much is purgeable? Any amount of space that is purgeable is available to use, because the system will automatically purge that and use it when your drive gets low on space. But if there is no purgeable space and your available space gets low, then you need to do something.

Jan 21, 2018 2:45 AM in response to bindex

I found out my system had 90GB of system storage that was taking up way too much storage. I used an app called Privacy Cleaner which is free. It wasn't perfect but did allow me to clear 40GB of logs and and another 10GB of stuff.

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System Storage Taking Up Way Too Much Space in macOS Sierra