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

How did this affect your applications and settings that were installed before you re-installed the OS? I have applications like Microsoft Office installed and have many complex rules in Outlook that would take a lot of time to rebuild and would like to avoid it if possible.

When I look for Time Machine backups in the terminal it shows nothing. I don't have Time Machine enabled as far as I can tell. Still, my system takes up 130GB of 250GB! More than half, and the system is taking up far more space than both Applications and Documents combined!

I have the same problem, I used Disk Inventory X to check what takes up so much space but it doesn't even makes sense, apparently my system takes up 191GB, programs and apps takes almost 11GB.

But when checking with Disk Inventory X it can only find stuff for 91GB, and the biggest thing I have is text documents.

I get the "Storage almost full" warning all the time but I can still download stuff so I guess I still have storage that is free but just not showing.

This was actually so helpful. I found 3 files taking up 15-20 Gb a piece hiding in my system storage instead of applications. I thought the OS was just taking up an insane amount of space. The application was super easy and clear to use, told me exactly what was taking up storage and deleted it without any problems.

Entry level drives are small. It's up to the user to buy a Mac with a drive sized to meet their needs.

The problem is how certain apps save cache files that is causing the problem where you didn't see this in the past. While it's Apple's fault the number is miscategorized, the best option to view your free disk space is in Disk Utility or in a Finder window if you select to view Status bar.

I'm having this problem now as well. 2015 Macbook pro with Sierra. "About this Mac" says system is taking about 111 Gb, but OmniDiskSweeper says all the files on the HD amount to only about 50 gigs, which sounds reasonable since I already deleted almost everything not necessary including iMovie, Garageband and stuff like that.

Caches folder in Library is only about 300Mb.

The only thing that I can think of is the "Private" folder which contains many subfolders that I don't have access to, so neither does OmniDisk. It doesn't even seem to be able to calculate the size for this folders when I click on "get info".

please guys, how can I know how much space these "forbidden" folders take?

Same here with a 13 Inch MBP from early 2015 with 128Gb SSD.

It reports 64Gig free, and says 105 Gig are taken by System.

I did this and it worked for me. Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback. 🙂

I have the same problem too. My new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and Touch ID ... 512 GB SSD... barely a month old shows system storage of over 200 GB!!!

What is causing this and how can I reduce it?

Really enlightening answer, thx RoyalFlushAK(s) !

This seemed open up about 30GB for me, thanks for posting this.

Why is the MacOS app store so useless? I searched for these apps and they don't seem to exist.

I just updated my MacBook Pro 2016 to the newest software update, now system take up 120gb of my 250gb ssd, I can't just change ssd so I need help to delete some of the "systems" 120gb use...

I connect my time machine drive every weekday and it backs up once an hour throughout the day. Should I do something different than that? Last backup was Friday afternoon at 4:00pm or so.