macOS High Sierra – Huge System Storage

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!

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:

This resulted:

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

So in the end if i double checked with

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

Hope this helps!

Credits to Mac Rumors user: lainvoo

I have the same problem. The system takes up 130GB! Less than what you have but in about the same ratio, strange. It's very surprising that that it takes so much memory to run the system. Applications and Documents take up far less space!

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!

just adding to the frustration here...

The terminal commands with "tmutil deletelocalsnapshots [filename]" helps a bit, but does not solve the problem. Hope the guys at Apple will sort this out soon...

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.

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

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?

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:

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!