SKYTOYUS
Level 1 (4 points)
Notebooks

Q: How to free storage space of my mac book air?

My mac book air has 251 GB memory.  The current storage shows some 200GB is already allocated to "system', while only 12BG is left free.  I think 200GB for system out of 251 GB is not normal, is it?  The others are other documents (12 GB), iTunes (8GB), iOS files (6GB), and photos (6 GB).  The OS is Sierra 10.12.  Can I free the storage space by reducing/chaging the size of 'system'? 

MacBook Air, macOS Sierra (10.12)

Posted on Oct 10, 2016 4:14 AM

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SKYTOYUS

Q: How to free storage space of my mac book air?

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  • by Ptaxey,

    Ptaxey Ptaxey Oct 10, 2016 5:20 AM in response to SKYTOYUS
    Level 4 (1,139 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 10, 2016 5:20 AM in response to SKYTOYUS

    Follow this instruction Free up storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

  • by dwb,

    dwb dwb Oct 10, 2016 9:46 AM in response to SKYTOYUS
    Level 7 (24,450 points)
    Notebooks
    Oct 10, 2016 9:46 AM in response to SKYTOYUS

    That Spotlight is reporting that much is used by System is suspicious. Prior to Sierra Spotlight indexing was known to be buggy and give results that were really off but Sierra seemed to have fixed that problem. Maybe not. Ptaxey is pointing you to Apple's knowledgebase article which is useful if you want to trust Apple's cloud. Personally, I'm more conservative.


    Whatever Spotlight might be telling you, if your hard drive is getting full and you want to free up space the one thing that will free up lots of space is moving video, music, and digital photos to an external drive. (BTW don't think that since you are using TimeMachine to back up the computer you are safe to delete things from the computer. TM is guaranteed to contain only what is on the computer's hard drive. Remove a file and it is fair game for deletion from TM.) To free space on my 13" MBA I moved all my music from the hard drive to a low profile SD card which I keep inserted in the SD card reader all the time.