How do I free up space for system files on an iMac with limited internal storage?

According to Migration Assistant, my applications directory was too big to restore. I deselected everything else, but it still wouldn’t let me restore from Time Machine. I’m now trying to just restore my applications directory, although for some reason it doesn’t seem to have my browser, DuckDuckGo. Where does DuckDuckGo keep its bookmarks? Maybe I can recover that at least.

I was able to find DuckDuckGoGo in a backup made at 0900 yesterday morning. I was able to restore from it, so at least I have all of my bookmarks and passwords back. After the purge, I have 32.7G available. I’ll need to track down and restore all of my apps one at a time.

After organizing and exporting all of my archived emails (25 years worth), I found out that the only way that I can read my archived emails is if they are imported onto my internal drive. Is there any way that I can keep my email archive in a readable format on my external drive?

This morning, I again had an error message saying that I could not complete Time Machine backups. The free space on my internal hard drive has decreased from 32G, back down to 2.5G. System data has increased from 122G to 175G. Does anybody know why my system data has expanded to more that half the size of my internal drive? Is there a way to correct this? This is my Fifth Mac, since I began keeping Time Machine backups. The first was a G4 sawtooth tower, then a 2008 iMac, then a 2009 iMac, followed by a 2020 M1 Mac Mini, then a 2021 iMac.

Nuke and pave might be my only option. I rebooted, because I was told that Time Machine couldn’t backup my main drive. However, as soon as I rebooted, I got the exact same message. So, if I wipe my drive and re-install without a Time Machine backup, will I still be able to recover individual files and applications from Time Machine? Otherwise, I’ll have to export my bookmarks, passwords, etc, save them on the external drive, and do the same for all of my emails, as well find a way to ensure that my Clamx antivirus software subscription transfers over to the new build. BTW, this thread is not linear, so it’s becoming very difficult to read.

After a reboot, Time Machine is still unable to perform a backup. My internal drive has 1.16G available after rebooting.

I was trying to clean up Mail just now, when it quit on me, saying that it didn’t have enough space to make changes.

Disk utility doesn’t look anything like that for me. I don’t see multiple snapshots.

I don’t have any snapshots of my data drive either.