141 gb of system data, help!!

[Ripebanana11]

This morning I notice that the system data on my MacBook pro was at 90 GB, so I cleaned up old files and got it down to 60gb. I took a break and started cleaning out more old files and I went to check what it is at and now it's 141 GB!! I have no idea how it went up that much and I have no idea what to do! please help!!

for reference, I have an M1 13-inch pro running Ventura.

 

[Fishrrman]

Download DiskWave from here:

DiskWave Homepage

It's small in size and free.

Open DiskWave and go to the preferences.
Put a checkmark in "show invisible files".
Close preferences.

The DiskWave window shows you all your volumes and drives in plain English (no ridiculous graphical formats).
Click on any item "on the left".
Now, you'll see what's ON the volume, listed in order of "largest to smallest".
You can easily locate what's eating up your space.

 

[Brian33]

On an APFS-formatted boot volume, I believe the System Data category includes data that only exists in snapshots. Any files you delete will still exist in previous snapshots. Normally, snapshots are automatically deleted after 24 hours, or earlier if empty space is "needed" on the boot volume.

So, it's nothing to worry about.

If you really want to, you can delete snapshots in Disk Utility after turning on View-->Show APFS Snapshots. However, the results may be counter-intuitive and confusing unless you really understand how snapshots work. Best rule of thumb is to delete the oldest first.

 

[chabig]

I agree with @Brian33. Mine is 110GB and I don't worry about it. My SSD is 500GB and 200GB is free.

These are the things reported in System Data, and they exist to help the machine run efficiently. It's not cruft that you can just delete, nor does trying to delete any of it make your machine run better. If more space is needed for your files, the system will make space.

- macOS system
- temporary files
- App extensions/plugins
- Cache files such as system cache, browser cache, user cache
- Disk images and archives such as .dmg, .zip, etc.
- Old backups