Full system drive

[jayducharme]

After I updated to 26.6.2, my 1 tb system drive on my M2 Mac Studio suddenly reported being nearly full (about 860 gb, with only about 100 gb purgeable). I got info on each folder on my system drive and totaled up about 320 gb of data. Does anyone know what the heck has happened?

 

[Bigwaff]

Open Disk Utility. Select menu View > Show All Devices. Select 'Data' volume in the tree. Select menu View > Show APFS Snapshots. Are there any snapshots? Post picture.

 

[gilby101]

my 1 tb system drive on my M2 Mac Studio suddenly reported being nearly full

How did it report?

I got info on each folder on my system drive and totaled up about 320 gb of data.

Was that really all folders? By default Finder hides many important folders. In Finder the shortcut Shift+Command+Dot/Period enables and disables showing hidden folders.

Much easier to use Daisy Disk https://daisydiskapp.com/

 

[benholt]

Same thing hit me on my M2 Ultra Studio after the 26.6.1 to 26.6.2 jump — Apple keeps the pre-update boot snapshot around as a rollback safety net and on a point release it can easily be 30-50GB. Run tmutil listlocalsnapshots / in Terminal and see what shows up. To clear it aggressively: sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 999999999999 4 will free everything not currently pinned. I got about 42GB back on mine.

Also worth peeking at the on-device Intelligence model caches under /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/db/ — those have been growing between point releases here and Finder's Get Info won't count them.

 

[jayducharme]

Are there any snapshots? Post picture.

Here you go:

Also worth peeking at the on-device Intelligence model caches under /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/db/

That directory doesn't exist on my system; there's no Data folder (that I can see). BTW, the way I found out about this was by working on a FCPX project. Everything froze and I got an error message saying I was out of disk space. (All my videos are stored on an external drive.)

 

[jayducharme]

I figured it out. I had nearly 1/2 tb of iPhone and iPad backups. I was shocked that they took up so much room. I recently had gone on a trip, so I had backed up my devices before I left. Now I know that if I do that again, I'll delete the backups when I return.

 

[jayducharme]

Nope, I didn't figure it out. After deleting all that, there's still 400 gb of storage locked up by "System Data" that I can't seem to do anything about.

 

[jayducharme]

I called Apple tech support. It's sad that Apple, which used to have the best tech support, is now defaulting to automated help. The bot couldn't figure out what was wrong and simply told me I couldn't do anything about it.

 

[benholt]

Sorry the Apple bot was zero help — this is exactly the case where handoff should just happen. "System Data" is a catch-all bucket and Finder Get Info undercounts because it skips protected paths. Fastest breakdown from Terminal: sudo du -x -d 2 -h /System/Volumes/Data 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -30 — that'll dump the 30 biggest directories on the data volume so the culprit usually jumps out. If you'd rather see it visually, GrandPerspective (free) draws a treemap and asks for admin access so it can peek into the paths Finder can't. Since you were mid-FCPX, also worth checking ~/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro and ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.motion — background renders and analysis caches pile up in those even when the project media itself lives on an external drive.