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How to reduce System Storage?

I've read a lot of articles about how to reduce storage but most of them are about deleting unused files or applications. However I already done all of that and stop my time machine from automatically backups. Still my system storage is taking around 160GB every time I open up my Mac. Is there a way to reduce system storage (not other type of storage)?? Because the system is taking like more than half of my storage when I run software sometime it can't save my files because there are no more room to save and my files are automatically deleted due to this reason. I want to find a way to solve this.



MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Sep 21, 2020 10:58 PM

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3 replies

Sep 22, 2020 11:25 AM in response to karenlin

Forget the "Storage" report for sanity reasons.


Have you emptied the trash lately?


OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/


Purging local backups

Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.

Start Terminal from spotlight.

At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates.

Hit enter.


Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.

Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.


Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.

Hit enter.

Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required


http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html

Sep 22, 2020 8:25 PM in response to BDAqua

I do frequently empty my trash because there's no more room to run my software. And I frequently check all my files and make sure that I delete the unnecessary ones and move them into my other hard drive. So all I left with are the files I need in the moment and the softwares on my mac.


I did try the tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates things you mention and there's nothing coming up in my terminal. It only shows:

Snapshot dates for all disks:

And then that's it. No backup files listed or other stuffs. I think I do cancel the automatic time machine backup quite long time ago maybe that's why there's no files?


I think I've done everything I possibly could about cleaning the unnecessary files and time machine backups but still my system storage is taking up more than half of my storage so that I couldn't run my computer. I really want to know how to reduce the system part of it.

Sep 23, 2020 9:31 AM in response to karenlin

You can't trust that it is actually System taking it up.


How much space does a Get info report for used & available?


Do you have enough room to run OmniDiskSweeper?


Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode?


Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

How to reduce System Storage?

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