System Storage Taking Up Way Too Much Space in macOS Sierra

I found that iCloud drive was taking 600GB of space on my iMac. I deleted that then located the iCloud Drive Archive folder, deleted that and my mac System storage lowers significantly and my iMac started to get a lot faster again as well.

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

I actually watched my system capacity from when I started my computer. For me, it seems to rise as I use my computer, and slowly, it builds up in just 20 minutes, and my computer freezes and I have to force shut it down. It does this cause too much space has been taken up by the system, so I can’t delete anything. I don’t know if this is the same problem for you, but hopefully someone can find the solution to this, because it’s really hard for me to do my homework.

My system storage was also taking up way too much space in Mac OS Sierra (over 100 GB). I tried all the online solutions that I could find, but none worked. Then a Mac repairman suggested reinstalling Mac OS Sierra. With some finagling, I managed to do so, and—voila!—the problem was fixed. Now my system storage only takes up around 12 GB. So much better!

My system storage was also taking up way too much space in Mac OS Sierra (over 100 GB). I tried all the online solutions that I could find, but none worked. Then a Mac repairman suggested reinstalling Mac OS Sierra. With some finagling, I managed to do so, and—voila!—the problem was fixed. Now my system storage only takes up around 12 GB. So much better!

I found out what takes my storage. I recently install Microsoft Out look on my Mac. It creates a huge back up in my local SSD. I found this by using OmiiDiskSweeper. Download OmniDiskSweeper and analyze your hard drive

if anyone is having this issue follow the instructions on this youtube video in short it's your time machine back up that is taking up all that room now

How to Clear System Storage on MacOS High Sierra - YouTube

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.

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.

I had this problem too. But I was able to solve it by going into ~/Library/Containers/ then searching for users and deleting a user file from a previous deleted account. That user file was 36GB and was eating up a lot of my storage. I had created this user earlier and then deleted it but with the option of keeping the user's dmg file on my mac.

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.

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

I have the same problem. I spent a long time on the phone today with Apple Support and basically the two different guys couldn't tell me why my system file was so huge - approximately 85-90 GB of a total of 120 GB hard drive. My iTunes and Photos aren't even stored on the computer - they are on a separate external hard drive. They Apple guy basically said "I can't help you." I have been trying to reduce the clutter and have managed to shave a few gigs total (about four) from my machine, but the System folder still has almost 3/4 of my hard drive tied up and I am continuously getting the "you better do something quick" message.

I had more that 320 Gb of system size, thus I opened the Terminal and entered the Library folder:

cd /Users/your_username/Library/

Then listed folder usage:

du -d1 -h

And found that Containers and Developer folders where using more than 200 Gb of space.

Now you can enter each folder and repeat listing disk usage and nail down the application is using all that space

Its up to you to understand if you can clean up or not the data depending on which app is using your space; in my situation I had a docker image and many archives I could delete.

Bests,

Josef ***
[Personal Information Edited by Host]

I seem to recall that system files rise tremendously when there are pending updates that were automatically downloaded. One tome my son stem files were through the ruling and after updating they suddenly decreased to normal...

Please tell. Apple techs that you want to Escalade the tech support concern