Mac Storage Issue – System Data Taking Up Excess Space

[Naqeeb1]

Hi Guys,

 

We have several Macs that are AD-managed, and we've been experiencing storage issues over the past few months. Initially, user profiles were taking up most of the space, so we created a script to automatically delete profiles every 5 days.

However, we’re now seeing System Data taking up nearly 200GB on each device. I’ve already cleared the cache, but the issue persists.

Has anyone encountered this before or found a way to resolve it?

 

[3s-gtech]

Yup. Tried everything at my disposal. I saw this at its worst on OS X 10.13, but I've heard it has hit other versions too. Literally not a single tool I used could tell me where hundreds of GB had gone.

 

I wiped and upgraded the OS on all of our Macs instead.

[Gongalong]

Same here. My best guess for us was that a Logic update seemed to leave the entirety of the previous version behind. But unlike a Windows PC, I couldn't find any way of spotting it, let alone deleting it. We also had to wipe and reinstall, complicated by having to be 100% sure we'd backed up profiles from GCSE students. Suffice to say our next Macs will have 512GB disks!

[edmokeski]

Have you worked out where it all is?

I haven't had the issue in 6-12 months, so think maybe it's been fixed in a recent update, but in the past had issues with Spotlight going nuts and filling the disk.  There'd be a huge amount of data in ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight which I had to clear out.  It's something to do with Spotlight indexing being buggy.  In the disk usage monitor in System Preferences, this would show up as "System Data" using tons and tons of space.

I think, if you Google around for it, you can find some instructions on forcing the Mac to rebuild its Spotlight index that might fix it, or you can do as I did for a bit and just bin the stuff in that folder every six months.  Doesn't look like it is happening again, so hopefully the issue is fixed as of or before Sequoia 15.7.2.

[2ilent8cho]

System Data is really a catch all category for anything not in the other categories. I use somthing like this utility https://www.derlien.com/downloads/index.html it then lists all the folders as a tree by size of data in them starting at the root of the drive and then expands out. That utility is not signed so need to run the 'xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Disk\ Inventory\ X.app'  command on it to get past gate keeper blocking it from running. 

[Gongalong]

I remember trying a bunch of folder site utilities at the time. I forget whether I was able to separate out a specific folder, but at the time I wasn't able to discern what was causing it, let alone delete it. If it happens again I'll try that app. Thankfully, with the combination of the relatively easy OS reinstall and Mosyle MDM it wasn't vastly time consuming to rebuild the machines we have.