Look how huge is the system storage:
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
@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
@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
I had the same problem. googled about it tried different things, nothing work.
eventually, I decided to reset my MacBook Pro, reinstall the OS, and restore it from Time Machine.
in the restore option, you will see the file and document restore option the did categorized the those miscellaneous files into one check box item, and make sure you don't check that one.
happily using my MacBook Pro now with the received ~100GB
The problem in my case was apple mail logs. The logs were taking up 220 Gigabytes, almost half my hard drive!!!
I deleted them and recovered the space
To Turn this off, go to Mail, Window, Connection Doctor and turn off logging
Hi, no, in the 686GB /, / means the top level of the partition or drive, all of it in other words, or how much space is used on the whole drive.
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!
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.
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.
Oddly enough, after restarting the computer, the system storage increased by 2GB while the total increased by almost 100GB. I really do not know what's going on. Anyone has any idea about what is happening?
And, before that, it was more oddly than ever. Look at this:
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:
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?
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):
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.
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:
sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
This resulted:
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:
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2017-09-27-005259
So in the end if i double checked with
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
Gin-Luke, thank you for your contribution. Your tip was very helpful and useful. I follow the steps of that post and find this:
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?
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?
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?
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.
macOS High Sierra – Huge System Storage
