Huge System Data and Documents files filling up 1TB HD....

[justanothergeordie]

I have an M1 Mac Mini from which I need to move the contents as I am upgrading to an M2 Mac Studio. I was going to ask the forum the best way to do this (just double-checking that Apple's Migration Assistant was the best route), when I realised I've got a different issue.

I have a 1TB SSD HD on my Mini but not many files on the desktop – approx 30GB worth plus I have all my photos and videos in the Photos app on my HD and they take up approx 150GB and approx 100GB Apps but looking in Sys Settings > General > Storage I can see there are the following:

200GB Documents
95GB iOS files
272GB System Data

I use Time Machine, BackBlaze and SuperDuper! for backups. I am guessing some of the above are from one or all of these. Does anyone know how I can purge or delete any of these before I migrate to my new computer so it's not full of files which may not be needed or actually be understood by my new machine?

In addition, if I am backing up mine and my family's iPhones to a paid 2TB iCloud+, so does that mean I can get rid of the old iOS files?

Thanks

 

[smirking]

There's no sure-fire way to locate the kruft in your system that's accumulated, but my usual process is to use the built in "Storage Settings" in System Settings to zero in on very large files in the system first. That's not where most of my kruft is, but a few times it did identify a huge file I have stored in duplicate.

Next I run Omni Disksweeper. That gives you a summary of the directory size of every directory on your Mac. It'll take a bit of time to pick through the results, but this is the way I find some really huge offenders that I never knew about. Common culprits are automated backup files that don't ever get deleted, directories full of log files, and saved data caches from programs I no longer use or even have installed.

The worst thing I ever found this way were connection logs from OS X Mail. I had some connectivity issues to a mail server so I turned on the Connection Doctor logs. I forgot to turn it off and didn't realize that OS X Mail doesn't have a maximum log file size. It'll just keep storing until you run out of space and I almost did. In the course of 1 year, I had over 300GB of log files just from checking mail alone.

Using Omni Disksweeper may be overkill if your usage patterns are very typical though. It's for detailed analysis and you do need to have a pretty good idea what you're looking at or your can delete something you shouldn't be deleting.

 

[justanothergeordie]

Thanks for the reply. I can't get access to see what the 280GB of System Data is in either of System Settings > Storage or OmniDisk Sweeper.

I was just wondering if there was a way to kill any saved snapshots for BackBlaze, Time Machine etc plus whether I am safe to delete old iOS backups....?

 

[smirking]

You can get rid of Time Machine snapshots by turning off automatic backups or just by backing up to Time Machine. I don't know anything about BackBlaze so can't help there.

As for OmniDiskSweeper not finding the system files, it doesn't find anything for you. It just makes it much easier for you to spot unusual patterns in disk utilization. You have to do all the work yourself.

Start at the top of your directory tree and just start drilling down and inspect everything that is reporting back an unusually large directory size to you. Often you'll find some directory or two with a lot of large files that were missed by other programs. I usually find my offenders in one of the /Library folders.

 

[justanothergeordie]

Great thanks for the help.

 

[Fishrrman]

My advice (and my opinion only).

Use the SuperDuper backup for the migration.
I predict it will be "the cleanest way". Fastest, too.

On the day the new Studio is scheduled to arrive, do a "final backup" using SuperDuper on the old Mini. Now you are "up to date and ready".

When the Studio comes, take it out of the box and set it up.
Connect the SuperDuper backup.

Press the power on button for the first time.
Start clicking through setup.
When setup assistant asks if you want to migrate from another drive, YES, you do.
So... "aim" sa at the backup drive and give it time to "digest" everything (takes a while).

Now, setup assistant will present you with a list of things to migrate.
Going from m1 to m2 isn't "that big of a jump", so I suggest you leave everything checked and just migrate it all.

Give setup assistant time to do the migration ... again, it will take a while.

When done, you should see your old login screen, just as before.
So... log in and "look around".
You should be done!

Good luck.

 

[justanothergeordie]

Brilliant, thanks! My machine's due to arrive today so will follow your steps and do that – thanks again...

 

[Fishrrman]

Let us know how it goes...

 

[justanothergeordie]

Well, everything seemed to go okay, other than a million pop up messages which I fought off valiantly. The only issue was a bunch of software which the company I'm remotely working for has installed on my machine via their IT dept. They installed Lucid, Universal Type Client and something else. The UTC also requires plug ins for all Adobe software and apparently they're not yet compatible with Sonoma.

My first thought was to downgrade to Ventura which is working fine on my Mini but I just read you can't downgrade from the OS your Mac ships with......?