macOS High Sierra – Huge System Storage

I too am having this issue on my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014). I had very little on my computer this morning before System started becoming a monster.

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

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 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.

They know but I would not hope for an update to solve the issue: was on a chat with Apple Support for about an hour...

For OS High Sierra 10.13.3:

Suggestion 1) "Have you looked over your iTunes backups as many times they are the cause of large system files. You can follow the steps in this article to locate them. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204215"

Didn't work for me.

Suggestion 2) in Terminal "run the following command: $ tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 999999999999999"

--> "command not found"

Suggestion 3) "try only: tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 999999999999999"

still high system storage

Suggestion 4) "for this one, can you please go to Apple logo  > System Preferences > Spotlight. Click the Privacy tab. Then drag your hard drive (Macintosh HD) to the spotlight reindex window. Clicked “OK” when asked to confirm."

didn't work either

Suggestion 5) "we may want to consider reinstalling the software on your Mac to remove bugs, glitches and corrupted settings on the system without deleting any data from your Mac. How to reinstall macOS Would there be anything else?"

Come on, there must be a smarter way than a new installation, no?

Meanwhile system storage eats up 600 GB and I have only 12 GB available left. This is frustrating...

I had the same problem and after trying endless solutions (including the ones posted in this thread) that didn't work for me, and ultimately the only thing that fixed it was doing a clean install of the new OS from a boot drive.

In case you're still searching for an answer, or in case someone else with this problem comes upon this thread, I posted a more detailed update regarding what ultimately worked over in my thread regarding this hidden space / system storage problem; Re: Cannot find or remove 100+GB of "Hidden Space

Hopefully that helps people who haven't been able to fix this yet with any of the other available solutions out there.

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.

have this problem too. after discussion with support reinstalled system, folder were about 30Gb smaller (from 150 GBs to 120), but it is even too big and with every hour it is about 1Gb bigger, free space - smaller.

Found yesterday on developers forum - try to delete one folder in the time mashine preferences, may be it will help against loosing of free space. But the most people recommend to reinstall the system from “zero” and information than from backup, but not from TImeMashine - better to use third-party program. I don’t know, if it is actual know, because the people there tried to correct beta-versions of HS

Thanks for the help! My 2TB hard drive was getting full with less than 100gb free and Time Machine kept reporting that I didn't have enough space on my time capsule to do a backup. So I moved 1.2 TB of files to other drives and deleted them from my MacBook Pro (High Sierra) but the system file storage was indicating about 1.2 TB. Your procedure cleared out that whole extra system storage block so now I have 1.2 TB free. Thank you!

I had the same problem and wasted many ours trying to find the problem. My problem was not related to time machine as I was still using of 250 GB for system storage after I used terminal to remove the backups. Eventually , feeling untrusting of downloading and paying for software for something that apple should handle themselves, I paid for and downloaded "Clean my Mac". 10 minutes later I had reclaimed over 200GB of storage. Well done to clean my Mac for creating a program that actually works. I am very frustrated with apple that this should have been necessary. We pay a premium for our MacBook pro's and problems like this should not occur.

Super Helpful!

Done. Overjoyed.🙂

What happened to me was, after I deleted my iOS mobile backup (mobile backup is almost 120GB, where my SSD is 256GB) via "about>storage" immediately after I was able to see, the system storage increased and the iOS backup was deleted. Since I have a Time Machine backup on an external hard I tried the above method and it worked perfectly...

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!

Thanks for this solution, this has allowed me to reduce the storage used on my daughters MacBook Air within System Files by over 50%, whilst it is not reduced to the level on own MacBook Air, I am happy this is helping resolve the issue. Thankyou.