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

I am facing the same problem. I just bought a new 2017 macbook air new model with 128gb ssd and let me tell you, when I was in sierra, the system was taking around 6-7 gb but now it is taking around 38gb in high sierra and it keeps getting increase. I have found that whenever I delete anything on my mac and then empty my trash, the storage of the trash gets added to the system files. for example- if I have my system files of 38gb now and my trash has 500mb of files, by emptying the trash, this 500mb will get added to 38gb and will become 38.5gb and nothing will increase in the free space.

I have also contacted apple care and have talked to the senior advisors and they have asked for a 4 days time to consult their engineering team and then they will reply to me on 3 October,2017.

please reply to me if anyone has this same problem.

There are several apps that can save to Storage. See this post about local Time Machine backups taking up space.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storage-back-from-system.2 073174/Solution: Reclaim storage back from "System" | MacRumors Forums

128GB of storage is quite small, but this doesn't mean 50GB of storage taken from the system is normal.

I reckon there is something in your OS which is filling up the SSD. You said you wiped it clean and installed macOS High Sierra from scratch, didn't you? This means the new OS was basically empty, except for Apple's software.

I would suggest to use apps either like DaisyDisk (extremely user friendly), or OmniDiskSweeper, to check where those files are located and what are they.

Have you got a Time Machine backup enabled? The files might be Time Machine local snapshots.

Otherwise, they could be temporary files. If this is the case, you should simply shut down the computer. Once you start it up again, they might have gone.

I think I know what it is. Under sharing I found this new option called content caching. That cashes things from your network to speed up downloads. It's not a good idea to use that on laptops. I never turned it on. But try turning it off and see if it helps.

Do not launch OmniDiskSweeper, use Terminal to run as root. This will get files in system not just Users folder

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

command period to quit

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.

Removing the time machine backups.

I did the OmniDiskSweeper both launching the application and through the terminal via sudo and the results were the same and both did not show the TimeMachine backps.

I followed the instructions regarding removing the TimeMachine backups and deleted one snapshot as a test and it worked so I cleared the remaining items. I was confident that I had a recent backup completed. I would probably suggest or encourage a backup is complete before manually deleting the snapshots just in case.

Check to see if you have connection logging enabled for Mac Mail. I did, and was able to track down over a year's worth of connection logging( basically it records in a text file the details of every time you connect to a mail server and download or send messages). I was using around 145GB in my system storage, but was able to get that down to 39GB after deleting those logs and turning logging off.

To check this, open Mac Mail. Go to Window > Connection Doctor. Once that window opens up, in the bottom right corner there should be a checkbox that says "Log Connection Activity" and a button that says "Show Logs."
Click the button, and it will take you to the folder. Unless you specifically need those for some reason, all of the log files can be deleted, and as I stated, doing so cleared up over 100GB of storage for me.

Hope this help

I found an app called Dr. Cleaner on the App Store and it discovered a Mail log folder that was 130GB in size! It was only log files, nothing more. I feel Apple should include this kind of cleanup functionality into their Storage Management app, there is no reason not to. It's silly that the System node is greyed out where I could see that the system took up 200+GB of space, but there are no options to help you reduce that in Storage Management. That is really weak from Apple in this day and age. Kudos to Dr. Cleaner and similar apps which are at least filling the void in this area. But they are still 3rd party apps and I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling uncomfortable having to use such apps which go through all my files. I'm on MacOS High Sierra.

Girshon Rutstein wrote:

OmniDiscSweeper and I found 522.5GB Private out of which 479GB was Bluetooth thousands of PocketLoggerBluetooth, how do I delete them?

Those logs are in /var/log/Bluetooth/

You should be able to delete the log files from there, but you will probably have to authenticate with an admin user.

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.

Hi petey2428,

I would use Disk Cartography. It's an app directly from the AppStore.

Disk Cartography - clever disk space analyzer on the Mac App Store

-Oliver

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.

Just checked my iMac and the System folder is 7.84Gb, Library folder is 4.88Gb and Applications folder is 7.99Gb - that's a total of approximately 21Gb all under Macintosh HD.

With all my other stuff, music, photos, documents etc the total is only 100Gb, still have 400Gb available! - so would say your usage appears rather high. Only thought is the upgrade process sometimes moves files into a folder that it deems not compatible with the new system and secondly sometimes Finder does not always report usage accurately - you could try booting into Safe Mode (hold the shift down on restart) and then when that's done boot back normally and see if that recovers some lost disc space.