System taking too much space | masOS High Sierra

Coming late to this, but a very common cause of this "system taking too much space" is merely Time Machine local snapshots.

Try this in the Terminal:

tmutil lislocalsnapshots /

You are likely to see a long list of snapshots.

You can delete specific snapshots, or you can "thin" the space occupied:

sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 10000000000 4

Enter your password as requested (no characters show while you type it), press enter and wait a little.

(the number indicated is roughly 10GB, so the command will try to clear out about that space)

Have you tried this article? https://www.macworld.com/article/2030221/macs/our-favorite-mac-cleanup-tips.html

Cleaning up the mail directory took care of my space issue.

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

I managed with this bug by loading mac in safe mode, after logging in it showed me that i have previous amount of free disk space.

This "normal" and "caused" by APFS file system, it will even grow over time when more files are updated and/or changed even ofter.

In APFS only the changes in a file are "added" so that you have all versions in a smaller "file" than when you have versions together. But this "smaller" file has more "versions" of that file and thus in comparison to only the "final" edition of the file, it is larger.

This and some other things make me dislike APFS, even when more "efficient" than the HFS+ file system.

For "versioned" files I have already TimeMachine, I don't want APFS to have that on the OS disk too.

Lex

Unfortunately, the issue is not that I have actual files taking up space. It's that the operating system thinks there are more or larger files than there actually are.

I spent a couple of hours on the phone to Apple tech support yesterday. They were unable to solve the problem and just told me to format the drive and start again from a clean install of the OS. Not really the answer I was looking for, but it will have to do until they find proper solution to this bug.

My issue was a mail file gone awry that did not show up under normal searches. System space was jumping from 86-102 gb randomly and evenentually ened up with only have GB available space due to "system" taking up 85% of the drive.

I removed a 46 gb and a 21 gb file and have not had a problem since. Unfortunately, I do not have a screenshot to show you what to look for in case you have the same issue.

It seems that there are variety of things that could cause the artificially inflated system space issue.

I already told you how you can solve the problem.

Hi Luis,

(There is a typo in the Terminal command: the t in "list"is missing).

In HighSierra there are also a sort of "snapshots": sort of editions of changing files.

As said in my first post.

greets,

Lex

This is not a solution when you are on the go on some random place far far away from the closest city. Yes, i have internet and its quite good, but this time i want keep my files with me and not in the cloud. This is so silly, hard to believe Apple did this

Did the problem get solved for you once you back up and restored the data? Was the root cause resolved? I have this problem too and I have been through so many blogs, my system file is showing 256 GB of my 512GB of HD so I am pretty upset but before I go through the hassle of backing up and restoring I wanted to make sure it worked for you.

Thanks

Please attach the images you mentioned.

When you use the advice of Csound1, you go through a backup (that is not the converted SSD of your OS), and then everything comes back to normal.

Thank you for your reply, but do you have a solution ?