System data eating away all the disk space

[ParagJain]

Hello -

Need some help; off late, system data is eating away all the disk space, so much so that mac reports less than 2 GB free.
and then after few minutes recovers 10 to 12 GB and this has been happening entire day.

When i restart, i see about 40 GB free and then that disappears in few minutes and ranges between 2 GB to 15 GB.

I am not sure what is taking away that space or what process is causing this. Anyone else who has observed this and if there are any fixes to recover the empty space back.

thanks,

 

[!!!]

Try using something like OmniDiskSweeper to actually see what's taking up space.

 

[ParagJain]

moved away from pubiic beta to latest dev beta and that seems to have put a check for now, observed it for more than 12 hours now, seems to be lot stable and not chewing up all the free space.

 

[owidhh]

I'm on the dev beta and have the same issue...

 

[ParagJain]

oh.. so far from last 24 hours after the update, it seems to have settled down..no more disk space issues so far

 

[John Frahm]

I very well could be wrong but I believe this has to do with how Apple handles unified memory

 

[owidhh]

I very well could be wrong but I believe this has to do with how Apple handles unified memory

How so? What does that have to do with storage, and why only not and not the last 5 years of unified memory, and only some people?

 

[John Frahm]

I was looking for the article, but from memory Apples ram keeps active or foreseen memory active in ram and offloads memory that is not used that often to the internal SSD.

 

[John Frahm]

How so? What does that have to do with storage, and why only not and not the last 5 years of unified memory, and only some people?

it's called data swapping in Apple literature as outlined here. and usage plates a big part.

 

[owidhh]

I don't think it has anything to do with swap...

 

[ParagJain]

for me..it looked like some random process was eating up all the memory. However, from the last dev beta update, it has become very stable when it comes to disk space.

 

[benwiggy]

First, the categories in the Storage panel are defined by Spotlight's index. Second, the definition of "system data" is pretty much "everything else".

There are loads of forum threads across the internet about runaway system data, but because the definition is so vague, the cause could be any number of things.

 

[owidhh]

Exactly… either way this time it possibly is linked to the latest betas but who knows.

 

[owidhh]

FWIW it seems better after updating to beta7 but we’ll see how the next days go.

 

[ParagJain]

same... the latest beta seems to have fixed it on my mac mini