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macOS High Sierra – Huge System Storage

Look how huge is the system storage:

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Is anyone having the same problem than me? I do not konw why this is happening.

MacBook Pro TouchBar and Touch ID, macOS High Sierra (10.13), 13", 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, 3,3 GHz

Posted on Sep 25, 2017 3:36 PM

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Posted on Oct 10, 2017 3:43 PM

Hi, jb64, thank for your help. Your post was very useful.


But, I have some questions about the support article that you mentioned:

1) If was really the Time Machine snapshots the cause of the huge system storage, why my Finder window include local snapshots in their calculations of the storage space available on a disk, as you can see below? The amount is the same of "About This Mac". This seems not right.

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2) I'm not a IT guy (actually, I'm a lawyer), but, if I understood correctly, sometimes the OS uses speed of SSD (instead use memory). This action of macOS storage snapshots does not make the MacBook be slow?



Anyway, I schedule a call with AppleSupport to see this matters more accurately and after orientation I'll post the proper informations here.

83 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Oct 10, 2017 3:43 PM in response to jb64

Hi, jb64, thank for your help. Your post was very useful.


But, I have some questions about the support article that you mentioned:

1) If was really the Time Machine snapshots the cause of the huge system storage, why my Finder window include local snapshots in their calculations of the storage space available on a disk, as you can see below? The amount is the same of "About This Mac". This seems not right.

User uploaded fileUser uploaded file


2) I'm not a IT guy (actually, I'm a lawyer), but, if I understood correctly, sometimes the OS uses speed of SSD (instead use memory). This action of macOS storage snapshots does not make the MacBook be slow?



Anyway, I schedule a call with AppleSupport to see this matters more accurately and after orientation I'll post the proper informations here.

Sep 28, 2017 7:31 AM in response to rafaelalvesgb

Someone said to me that could be a problem with Time Machine. I don't think so, because my backup is updated until today, as you can see below:

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In "About This Mac" it was possible see the amount of storage destined to TimeMachine. In mine this it is not shown. I do not know if it is because my backup is updated or if it is because there is a problem.


Any suggestions or solutions?

Sep 28, 2017 5:17 PM in response to rafaelalvesgb

It is possible AFS taking time to be implemented, probably, because I'm with FileVault turned on?


Today, I went to "About This Mac" again and, for my surprise, the system is was with "just" 404,55GB, and 264,74GB of free space (before was 249,69GB):

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Maybe is a problem with spotlight also. I do not know. I will monitor the discussion and give updates until I find a solution for this.

Sep 29, 2017 7:09 AM in response to rafaelalvesgb

Turned to our good friend Google and I found that Time Machine local backups were the reason and 'sudo tmutil disablelocal' command was supposed to help, if only "disablelocal" verb had not been removed from High Sierra. So back to square one.


Did some digging a.k.a. opened the manual for tmutil. I found that there were two useful verbs "listlocalsnapshots" and "deletelocalsnapshots". Used the first one to get the exact date stamps required for the second one and deleted all local snapshots manually.


Result: "System" went from 158GB to 20GB.


Step by step I went as following:

Code:


sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

This resulted:

Code:


com.apple.TimeMachine.2017-09-27-005259

com.apple.TimeMachine.2017-09-27-104645

com.apple.TimeMachine.2017-09-27-114218

com.apple.TimeMachine.2017-09-27-124220

I took these four date stamps and followed the next command with each as following:

Code:


tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2017-09-27-005259

So in the end if i double checked with

Code:


sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

there were no snapshots and after checking "About This Mac -> Storage" I was overjoyed!


Hope this helps!

Credits to Mac Rumors user: lainvoo

Sep 29, 2017 7:14 AM in response to Gin-Luke

Gin-Luke, thank you for your contribution. Your tip was very helpful and useful. I follow the steps of that post and find this:


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Now I can understand a little bit the situation. But I think there are still remain problems. Lets go talk about them.


1) My user folder has 100GB of photos and 1,24GB of Music, as you can see in the photo below (I used "Get Info" function on all folders that are in my user folder), but I could'nt find the other 170GB of storage. I think this is a system problem. Any ideas?


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2) Actually, it appears that users folder's storage (function "Get Info") is higher than informed on Terminal: 296,66GB, instead of 273GB. It might be a Spotlight problem?


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3) Shouldn't the macOS consider iPhoto Library as "photos" instead files of System? Isn't this a error/bug?


4) The system normally has 40GB up to 50GB of storage. So, considering that mine is with 532GB, and my user folder has 296,GB, I still have 185GB (approximately) that still has origin unknown. Any ideias about it?

Feb 2, 2018 11:10 AM in response to rafaelalvesgb

I noticed that my disk space was being over ran by SYSTEMs Data (on MacOS HighSierra). I never had this issue in previous OS versions, but this was nearly half my storage!!!


Not to worry as there is a solution below:


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I ran MacPaw's CleanMyMac Pro, but it only aleviated 9.91GB of space. That means theres something else thats eating away at this OS.


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I kept digging and found this post. JamBeats mentioned that TimeMachine is storing snapshots on the local disk. I looked into it and found that I had a couple snap shots on my disk.


Code:

sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /


So I preceded to delete the snapshots on my local disk


Code:

tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <timestamp>


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Once all these snapshots were deleted. I reviewed my Storage Disk and found it at 75.02GB in use.


This Fixed my Problem.


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Thanks Everyone!

Feb 24, 2018 12:25 AM in response to JamBeats

It doesn't work for me.

I repeated exactly as you (JamBeats) suggested, and it didn't solve the problem.

Interestingly, the backup snapshots are gone, but the system still takes about 313 GB of my SSD (see the screenshot).

I am guessing that the guys in Apple know about this problem. I will wait for the next macOS update. Hopefully it will solve the issue.


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Feb 27, 2018 3:37 AM in response to sageonthehill

Solved!


Been on the phone today for 1.5 h with a brilliant 😊 Apple Support Consultant who solved the case. Turns out the main problem was a log file in com.apple.mail which continuously kept adding on massive amounts of data


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(Note that these are .txt files. We had fun calculating that a 560 GB file would equal about 560 trillion characters...)


So, deleted the log files and turned off log connection activity


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...et voilá!

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What a relief!

Apr 28, 2018 9:19 AM in response to rafaelalvesgb

Hello, I have the same problem but the terminal commands are working... at least nothing is being listed. User uploaded file


This is what I've done in Terminal

Last login: Sat Apr 28 19:11:51 on ttys000

Apple-MacBook-Air-2:~ SteveMac$ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Password:

Apple-MacBook-Air-2:~ SteveMac$ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Apple-MacBook-Air-2:~ SteveMac$

Is it possible I have this much space on my system for another reason. I have 'automatic' backups turned off on Time Machine. I don't even use Time Machine--at least I didn't think I was and this has only been happening for the last several weeks. Any ideas?

Jun 6, 2018 11:50 AM in response to rafaelalvesgb

My issue with this problem started when I was prompted to update High Sierra and was told I did not have enough disk space on my 2011 MacBook Air. My system folder at the time was only 65G out of 250 (Bootcamp took 50 of the 250). I started deleting big files I no longer needed, but even after deleting them from Trash, my available space was not getting larger, the System folder was! This continued until my System folder was 198G! And I still could not update anything.


I tried everything I read here: deleted Time Machine snapshots, reindexing with Spotlight, but nothing worked. I tried installing a fresh copy of High Sierra over the original but couldn't because I didn't have enough disk space!! And I there was nothing I could do to create more, since ever app and file I deleted had it's HD space gobbled up by System!


Fortunately, I had a bootcamp partition on my HD and as a las resort, removed it and OS repartitioned my drive so I no had the full 250G. That gave me enough space to try an OS install. But that didn't help.


Before doing anything drastic, I spent and hour+ at the Genius bar, moving from apprentice genius to genius and finally to arch genius. No one saw this before or could help.


Before restoring to a new machine and moving files manually, I did a full back up to a fresh external drive and then command-R from boot up to restore from this back up. Viola! My system folder went back to 50+G and all was well.


Before:

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After:


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Jun 12, 2018 9:53 PM in response to rafaelalvesgb

Please check if you are using Mail.APP then you might have connection log option on and that is creating logs in to below folder.


Click Go Menu in Finder, Click Go to Folder copy and paste below location that contains Log files.

See File size that is huge for e.g imap.gmail.com *********.txt in My case Or similar. Copy and take back up in external HDD then Delete that file.

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Logs/Mail


You can disable this option form connection doctor in Mail.app.

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Hope this will resolve your issue.

Oct 22, 2018 11:47 AM in response to Gideonblaze

Finally beat this “Huge System Storage” thing. Seems from this and other threads that there isn’t one specific cause, but the common theme is buried, or hidden, files/folders.


I finally broke down and installed free-to-try OmniDiskSweeper as others have previously suggested. It immediately identified a 374GB “in progress” Time Machine backup from, not coincidentally, right before I noticed my SSD unexpectedly near-full; it was showing as a hidden volume, not visible from Finder.


I deleted that hidden volume and thought at first it didn’t work, but lo and behold an hour or so later that space became available again, both in Get Info and About This Mac > Storage. My knowledge of macOS is miniscule, but guessing it just took time to re-index the SSD in the background.


Perhaps it is just a matter of whatever buried files (in some cases, GB of google mail drafts or huge numbers of text files for some errant application), or hidden folders/volumes. In my case, it presumably was a failed Time Machine backup.


Thanks to all who have contributed info to this thread!User uploaded file

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macOS High Sierra – Huge System Storage

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