System Storage Taking Up Way Too Much Space in macOS Sierra

Have you found a solution for this yet? I'm wondering if it has to do with my Mac caching the changes for time machine backups, but I turned off time machine and it is the same size.

I'm a developer so it's possible that it has to do with lots of packages I've installed for programming, but I doubt it'd be this large.

Being a novice, I was a little bit skeptical about all of this, my "system" was taking up over 600GB of room, which seemed ridiculous.

Based on my experience, readers might want to know, 1) My issue seemed to be created by Stamps.com, and

2) the OmniDiskSweeper, which is a free program, solved the problem for me. It ran a scan of the hard drive and led me to the problem.

Thanks to those who recommended the program. I was getting the dreaded "hard drive is almost full" message before I realized that I had a problem.

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/

just bought a new MacBook, had the same problem. I took about 80GB worth of music, put it into "my documents", then from there dragged the files into iTunes. I noticed iTunes had about 80GB, and my system storage wasn't far off that, so I deleted one song from my documents, and went to see if it would still play on iTunes. it did. so I deleted all my music files from "my documents", and the music still plays on iTunes, and iTunes still says there is about 80GB of music on there.

I had a back up of my music on an external hard drive so I wasn't too worried about losing my music from the laptops storage... id suggest if anyone deletes their files like I did to have a back up. I've cleared up a lot of space from my "system storage", and the files are still playable in iTunes, almost as if all the music files were stored twice, once in "my documents" and once in iTunes... its different to a PC where the files are stored where you store it and only links are made in iTunes to the music files (saving files only once)....hope this helps a few of you

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.

Diana of Oregon Thank You so much for this suggestion.

My wife does photography and shoot photos that take up a lot of space. She uses our 500 gb macbook to edit these photos....we were always having trouble with not enough space, I used Omnigroup sweeper and discovered over 300gb of photos that were duplicated. we now have plenty of free space, also 15gb of mail that was stored. Thank you again.

Too all the people who tell us to ignore the problem. It’s not just that it looks that the disk is full. With my MacBook working got a pain in the *** and slow, almost impossible to work with .. as if the ssd is almost full. So there has to be more to it.. what helped for me at the end is going back to a time machine backup befor the update to macOS High Sierra.. and now I’m waiting..

The fact that the representation of the storage on your hard drive is wildly in error has nothing to do with system performance.

Download and run Etrecheck. Copy and paste the results into your reply. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

I have this problem as well. At first, when I checked my disk space, the system had taken up about 9 GB, then it progressed to 54.13 GB and now, it's at 85.55 GB. I'm gonna take it to an apple store and see what they can do...

#2

This:

When a file gets deleted without any Time Machine backup, MacOS has a feature of a local Time Machine backup, which saves the file into the System section as shown in the About This Mac> Storage. The purgeable space is saved for whenever a local time machine backup needs to occur if in case any file had been deleted accidently from the system by the user. There is a way to disable this local time machine backup. Here are the following steps:

1. Open terminal
2. Type "df -h". This will show you a volume of MobileBackups if it was enabled and if this does apply to your system.
3. To disable your Mobile Backup, type "sudo tmutil disablelocal". When prompted for password then type in your password.
4. Check your Storage and see that the purgeable space has been deleted plus the System section has also shrunk to just contain the OSX.

To enable/re-enable the local Time machine backup:

1. Open Terminal
2. Type "sudo tmutil enablelocal". When prompted for password then type in your password. This will then start making a local time machine backup in the system. This will take a while. If you want a quick backup then type "tmutil snapshot".
3. Check your Storage to see that the backup has been made with minimal amount of purgeable space since the snapshot was made. Note that the system section has also increased at this point too to include the previous backup but this time without the space for the purgeable space reserved for this size.

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!