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

Hi all,


I have a mid-2013 Macbook Air with 120 GB of SSD storage. I updated my OS to sierra and noticed that the "system" is taking up 100 GB of storage! I tried to delete my files, but for some reason I still have very high amount of system storage.


I decided to do wipe my whole computer and do a clean install. With the clean install, I am seeing 50 GB of system storage. That sounds like a ton of storage used for system to me. Is this typical? I don't remember seeing this much space taken up in Yosemite/El Capitan.


Thanks a lot for your help!

MacBook Air, iOS 10.0.2

Posted on Oct 1, 2016 2:15 PM

Reply
82 replies

Dec 26, 2016 12:20 PM in response to petey2428

Hi petey2428,

I just checked mine and system takes 108 G of storage.

I guess it is because that Mac counts all the files with unknown extension as "system" (anyone please correct me if this is wrong).

I have these video game support files with extensions of ".001" ".002"..., and they won't be found under "system information".

In a word, I don't feel that there are some sort of problems with your system. You might want to check if you have these kind of supporting files, some of them might be taking much of your storage.


These are mine:

User uploaded file

User uploaded file

Dec 28, 2016 6:03 AM in response to dianeoforegon

dianeoforegon, you have the right idea.

listen everyone, i had this issue today 12/28/16 where i know i had 350Gb of free space and i was getting the system storage almost full message. I installed omnidisksweeper and i quickly saw there was a log file that was in my case associated with parallels that was 350Gb in size. I deleted the file and emptied the trash. problem solved.
as for what caused the log file to report at that size i'm not sure but I will continue to monitor.

Dec 28, 2016 3:12 PM in response to chachie73

Found out the following info regarding large files:


This can happen. Usually, it is a result of the user turning on “verbose logging” for a specific reason, and then not turning it off afterwards.


Also, to be really precise, the log files are stored in the Library folder, not the System Folder.

This is would be the more typical space usage:


User uploaded file


In the future if you find files in your System folder, please take a screen shot. This would help identify the problem.


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Command-Shift-4 takes a portion of the screen. <--use this one



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

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