macOS High Sierra – Huge System Storage

I went to Launchpad then "Other", then to "Terminal". When that opens, you'll see a prompt after your user name. Then type this:

sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Be sure to include the spaces and the "/" at the end.

It will ask for your password which is the same password you use to unlock your Mac.

Then it will list the snapshots you have on your system. The rest is explained in JamBeats post from earlier in this thread. I'll paste it here:

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

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I had about 8 snapshots in my original listing. After doing this procedure, my system storage size went from over 1.2TB to just over 20gb.

Hope that helps! Thanks again to JamBeats for posting the process.

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:

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.

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>

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

This Fixed my Problem.

Thanks Everyone!

Manual but 100% effective mode ( without downloading software ).

Open Terminal... ( you will run as sudo so you can see all folders ). The du -hd 1 command is a utility that shows folder size and the one specifies a recursion level of one ( look at the immediate folders ).

1. cd /
2. sudo du -hd 1 .

You'll see a list of directories and sizes...

0B ./.config

535M ./Music

8.0K ./.vim

0B ./AppName.app

28K ./.subversion

8.0K ./.adobe

92K ./.local

1.8G ./Pictures

9.4M ./Desktop

51G ./Library

That last one looks huge! So repeat the process above...

1. cd Library
2. sudo du -hd 1 .

Keep repeating until you drill down to the folder that's the culprit. Then make decisions. Delete etc... If it is a time machine folder, do not delete those files, use the time machine utility. If its photos, do backups before deleting. If its something else do research.

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.

Hope this will resolve your issue.

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!

I investigated this after having the same problem and came across this https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7691903?answerId=32229679022#32229679022&start=45&tstart=0

Time Machine in macOS High Sierra stores snapshots on every APFS-formatted, all-flash storage device in your Mac or directly connected to your Mac. Time Machine in earlier macOS versions stores snapshots only on the internal startup disk of Mac notebook computers.

To make sure that you have storage space when you need it, snapshots are stored only on disks that have plenty of free space. When storage space gets low, snapshots are automatically deleted, starting with the oldest. That's why Finder and Get Info windows don't include local snapshots in their calculations of the storage space available on a disk. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015

For anyone else with this issue, I recommend downloading Disk Wave as a few other people have suggested on various forums. This helped me realize that when I "added" a user to my Mac in order to change the name of it, it retained my entire library on top of the new one..basically I had a duplicate of my entire storage. So after deleting that, deleting my duplicate music files (and only keeping the "iTunes Media" folder versions, and moving old files to an external drive, I went from 75GB free to 380GB free!

I had this too. After scouring google for answers and trying everything from removing my Time Machine and removing its cache storage (did nothing). To resetting PRAM (did nothing) I FINALLY got on Apple Support Chat. My issue was escalated to senior tech Nicole. She helped me hunt down....HDHomeRun with a whopping 390GB in storage. I don't even have the version that's supposed to record so how is that happening??! Anyway, I rarely used it (which is why I never considered it to be the problem) so just uninstalled. Now my system is back down to reasonable 30GB with over 450GB AVAILABLE. So if you have some sort of digital antenna service..that could be it...somehow covertly storing huge data!
Just thought I would share my resolution because the problem is very frustrating and hard to find.

Had ostensibly the same problem, posting a reply in case anyone else needs another possible solution. I found out that my computer was attempting to create an unlimited number of "cores" which are described elsewhere as a kind of snapshot of the RAM at a time when a process isn't working properly. These can be about 500MB each - and when the computer makes 10 all of a sudden it chews up a lot of space.

To get rid of them, navigate to Macintosh HD (or whatever you've renamed the hard drive to), show hidden files, and then navigate to "cores". If you've got the same issue as me, you'll see a huge list of "cores" that you can delete. Thing is, your computer will keep making them until you solve the problem of what's actually creating the cores.

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:

After:

I was presented with a friends MacBook today which despite her removing as much un-needed stuff as possible had virtually no space left on the 120GB drive. Only a few MB remained. It was virtually impossible to do anything at all.

She had used the macBook for her business for a few years and had 2 email accounts used extensively day to day for corresponding with clients and sending forms etc. for bookings and the like. One account was with 1&1 the other with Sky. She has just sold her business and no longer needs the accounts but her machine was unusable.

When I looked in some detail by switching off both accounts to prevent further updating any attempt at a clean up just caused any space reclaimed to disappear within minutes. The culprit was principally her Sky account which contained emails going back to September 2009! These were taking up a large amount of space. I simply removed both accounts and this recovered approximately 2.5GB which gave enough leeway to work with but did not solve the issue of huge storage being taken up mysteriously as there was still 96GB taken up that was hidden somewhere.

After a great deal of poking around with Spotlight in her hidden user Library I eventually came across some Sky iMap Log files which were responsible for the missing 96GB and about 1.6GB of similar files for 1&1 iMap email. Hand removal of these got back a working and much faster! MacBook.

I have absolutely no idea why or for what reason these supposed gargantuan log files existed. Presumably they should have been deleted but weren't.

Those struggling with high storage usage may find it helpful to look for similar issues with email.

A cautionary tale for those reluctant to delete old un-needed emails.

Hope this helps.

@Gin-Luke is a life saver. I was able to use du utility to investigate what was taking up most of my space.

get the details at command line with: man du

for me its was:

1) ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport => 20g

2) ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/Archive => 11g

3) ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker => 11g

OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/

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

(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

...et voilá!

What a relief!

I had this problem, my Mac was showing 417GB in System resources! I had 12GB free on a 500GB HDD which seemed absurd.

Turned out to be a file AAMupdater (if any of you use Adobe Creative Cloud) which was taking up 350gb. I downloaded omnisweeper to find the file and just deleted it. But do your research first as I have yet to see the implications of me deleting this file. Adobe is working fine so not to bothered yet)

Reset my Mac and now it shows I have 348GB Free (from 12GB, not bad)

Good Luck