MacOS Sierra - 50-100GB of system storage??

Late to the party, but I have the same setup as you (2013 MacBook Pro w/ 120 GB drive). Your "System" files should only take up roughly 20 - 50 GB. 50 if you never cleaned your computer since you bought it, 20 If you have done regular maintenance.

Here are a few steps to fix this problem:

1) Download MacCleaner and use it to remove any unwanted programs from your computer, checking ALL boxes when deleting the program. This will help cut time later.

2) Download the free trail of Daisy Disk. When asked if you would like to purchase, just click "Test Drive". Next to the "Scan" button, click the down arrow, and select "Scan as Administrator" and enter your password in the popup box to start the scan (you only have to enter your password once, required by macOS to access some files).

After the scan is complete, click through the menu on the right hand side to see where your largest files are at. Delete ONLY the files you are sure of. If you are not sure what a file is, GOOGLE IT. If you still are not sure, LEAVE IT.

When you want to delete a file, simply right-click on it in the menu, and select "Show in Finder", then delete it in finder. If it is hidden, it is likely hidden for a reason! If you want to delete a hidden file, you can open terminal and type "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES && killall Finder" to do this. Just make sure to type "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO && killall Finder" to re-hide them when your done!

3) Restart your laptop in safe mode! To do this, restart in which ever manner you wish making sure your sound is at a level you can hear it. When you hear the chime, hold down either SHIFT key. Release it when you see the Apple logo. Login to the first screen. After this, you may restart (without holding the shift) and your space should be restored!

IF your "System" space has not been restored to bellow 35GB, you have a rogue system file!

Hey,

So I was having the same issue on my MacBook Pro 2015 edition (My system storage was around 105GB).

Follow the below steps to resolve:

1. Shut down your computer (not restart).

2. Click the power button and immediately hold down the shift key. This will put your computer into safe mode (you will see safe mode listed at the top right).

3. Log into your computer.

4. Once logged in, immediately restart your computer in regular mode, not safe.

5. Go to about this mac and see storage. Storage levels for "system storage" should be back to Normal. Apple support mentioned that this is normal to take up space. They recommended to avoid this from happening to fully shut down your computer occasionally.

Hope this helps!

Matt

YES THAT HELPS! :-)

Thank you so much - just be rebooting in safe mode my space went from 20GB to 55GB.

None of the tools like omnidisksweeper or daisydisk could even see that the space was not free.

🙂

I have a MacBook Air 128GB. I came across similar problems around Christmas. I found a few problems.

First, when Mac iPhoto changed to Photos, it rebuilt a .photolibrary file and left the old .photolibrary file behind. I think the file was in /Users/<login name>/Pictures. My solution was to backup the old library to an external disk and delete it.

Second, disk usage reported under <Apple logo>/About This Mac/Storage counted files of different types differently in different OS versions. At one point, it told me 2/3 of the disk was used by OS files. After a couple of updates, OS usage dropped down to about 1/3. But I my disk was still full.

Third, too many deleted files lingered in Trash folder. I emptied Trash folder and that gave me back some space.

Fourth, Apple changed the way how to store and sync photos on different devices. When Apple introduced Camera Roll and Photo Stream, Camera Roll was meant to maintain a master copy of photos taken on a device and Photo Stream kept a copy of photos from other devices (I think that was limited to 30 days). Now. Apple offers iCloud photo library. The strategy on where to maintain a master copy has changed. iCloud photo library will now keep a master copy of all photos synced to it. Individual device will keep photos of resolution controlled by the OS (Mac has option to ask for high resolution photos). The new iCloud photo implementation seems to be a good idea. For example, when a iPhone runs out of storage when we are on the road, iOS can start to reduce resolution of photos stored on the device to free up some space without user intervention. The iPhone continue to work.

Fifth, I had too many photos on iCloud. Even syncing a reduced resolution version on this Mac Book Air was too much. Since I could do without all the Photos on this machine. I decided to turn off the iCloud Photo option.

Sixth, when a photo is deleted in Photos, Photos move the deleted photo into Recently Deleted album and keeps the deleted photo for 30 days. That is useful if we change our mind and want to recovered a deleted photo. However, that means storage is not free up for some time. A solution is to empty the Recently Deleted album manually.

With all these done, I regained 15GB of disk space. An alternative and simpler solution was to upgrade your SSD to a larger capacity disk. I did not choose the upgrade route was because I planned to buy a new Mac Book soon.

Hope this helps!

I've seen those files and I can understand why you are using them espically for gaming. If you are installing PSP games on your Mac and you are using OpenEmu that will take up a lot of space very quickly. I think I installed a bunch of PSP games and it started to eat at my Hard Drive rather quickly. What OpenEmu does is when you drag and drop the game into the app it saves a copy of the game to your hard drive so now you have two copies.

What I would do is delete the downloaded game files once you have the game working on your computer. If you wish to save the game files and not delete them then get a external hard drive to store them on. Other than that the games are always available on websites for free so there is really no need to keep copies of the game files once you drop them into OpenEmu.

The solution I took was removing OpenEmu from my MacBook Air completely and I just have it setup on my iMac where the hard drive will allow for more storage.

Dumb reply...people should read and understand the questions. Sorry pal, most of these forums are a colossal waste of time. Not your fault though, As APPLE should officially monitor and solve with detailed reply.

If your system file is small like yours, then this helps. But like OP posted, his was bloated from the start. This means he had either a rouge system file, or an unsuccessful clean install and still needed to follow my steps. It's also why I put the Safe Mode restart at #3. In personal experience, it doesn't matter if you fully shut down or just simply hit restart, but it may on newer models.

Hey,

that sounds so familiar to me - a few weeks ago I discovered the same shocking high usage of the system, I tried the same like you did, making a clean install but it didn't change anything. After that I visited an apple retailer (due to the lack of an apple store close to me) and together we realised that the system wasn't actually consuming that much space, the storage using overview was just broken. Summarizing all the GB of everything on my Macbook results into just a few GB for the system and since then I've never checked the storage information again (until now and I have to admit that it looks pretty alright by now - whatever it might have fixed it..)

So anyways, if you've just made the clean install, I would recommend you to summarise everything you put back on it again and just check if it's really that much for the system or if it's just not showing the right usage.

Good luck!

In my case, I also have 120GB of SSD. But it only shows 84GB available and 50GB of it was already used. So I'm missing like 36GB of SSD. I remember it started doing that when I uninstalled windows 10 using bootcamp which automatically created partition. I found out under disk utility that I have the same 36GB free storage partitioned. I figured out how to delete it by selecting the free storag and hit Apply. Viola! That solved my problem. Hope that helps.

What storage problem?

The several users on this thread who complained about low free space somehow seemed to find out why (paralllels here, after effects there, a bootcamp partition for other...) and Apple had nothing to do it.

I'd never buy a mac with only 128GB of storage, and then go and partition this (meager) drive to put bootcamp, for example. It is upon the user to figure out what he needs. I wish Apple would simply up the base storage to 256GB on all macs (and stop selling macs with 5400rpm hard drives - THAT I find embarrassing!)

The system is not actually taking up that much storage. It is actually miscategorized. To see if the system is truly taking up that much space:

-go to finder

-select go at the top of the screen

-go to computer

-select "Macintosh HD" (or whatever you have named your Hard Drive)

-command a - select all

-command i - get info on all folders

After the information loads in the top right of each box will be a GB amount. Normally it is the user folder that is taking up all the space. And you have to clean it out.

120 GB of SSD storage doesn't do the job. What you need is 10x that amount of storage and way more memory to have a working machine. Got a bigger HD or better get a new machine and couple hard drives connected outside of your little computer.

How is this answering the question ? I've been using a 120 Gb SSD throughout my macOS experience and it always DID the work just fine. Also, how would you explain why almost every entry-level Apple MacBooks comes with a 128 Gb SSD ? This is neither helpful nor accurate.

I thought found a solution. Yesterday I upgraded to the Beta high Sierra, like you I had 100gb on "system"... but I was also getting annoyed by the computer asking for the keychain password every 3 seconds.

I created a new user account and completely deleted the older one. It helped the keychain issue but not the "system" folder thing... anyone has a solution?

You should also consider checking if you have backed up other apple devices to your Mac. I have seen cases where users have backed up multiple iphones and Ipads to their and these can definitely eat up lot of system space.

My friend has a mid-2012 MacBook Pro with a 750GB hard drive. His storage is almost all system. He doesn't use Photos, iTunes or any other storage gobbling apps. just mainly Word. His HDD is so full I can't even install any type of app cleaner to get rid of files. I didn't get a chance to look at all of his system, but something is causing the computer to fill up the HDD. He's running Sierra 10.12.1.