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

Question

Level 1

74 points

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

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Answer 1

Dec 28, 2016 11:01 AM in response to chachie73

I wonder if the files created where "backup files" created of your VM. I'll see if I can find info about what Parallels might store in System folder.

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Answer 2

Dec 28, 2016 11:24 AM in response to dianeoforegon

Not sure but what was odd is I haven't run my VM for a few weeks and I just had the error today. The file that was reporting the 330Gb or so was a single log file. Runaway process maybe?

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Answer 3

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:

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

Command-Shift-3 takes the entire screen

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

Click on the camera icon in the toolbar of the reply window to post. Select image to upload.

Be careful not to include any private information.

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Answer 4

Apr 5, 2017 2:43 AM in response to megillc

same, I only have 20gb of storage left now and it's a real big problem

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Answer 5

May 15, 2017 1:44 AM in response to petey2428

For me it was the Adobe After Effects Media cache that took apparently about 50 GB of space.

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Answer 6

May 15, 2017 1:46 AM in response to RoyalFlushAK(s)

err ... 10 times the storage is definitely not needed. I don't even want to know what a Macbook with a 1TB SSD costs ... very likely not worth.

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Answer 7

pf2222

Level 1

41 points

May 24, 2017 8:30 AM in response to petey2428

I have just updated to OS/X 10.12.5 yesterday. Finder shows that I have 5GB more of free storage after the update. It looks like Apple is working hard in correcting the storage problem.

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