I'm on a MacBook with macOS High Sierra 10.13.6
I was running out of disk space, so I dug in some old folders, deleted pictures, cleared the trash, etc. My personal data storage dropped from ~30 to 15 GB of document data. ?
But as soon as I did that, the System Storage (which was taking around 45 GB in space) is now taking 75 GBs!!! ? That number has been fluctuating around 70~80 GBs (very fast btw depending on what I'm doing), but it used to be way below that this morning. So now I have even less overall space than when I started cleaning up!
What's going on?
I ran CleanMyMac X and cleared up some system junk and cache files. But somehow, the "System storage" yellow bar keeps going up. ⏫⏫⏫ I already restarted the MacBook two times.
Looking up online, I considered it might be some Time Machine snapshot files taking up space. But I ran sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots / and sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates / it didn't show anything, so I don't think that's the case. CleanMyMac X doesn't detect any malware either.
Any ideas on how to backtrack where the excessive storage is coming from? And why the hell the system decided to take up more space after I deleted my personal files?
UPDATE - more info:
• The method of restarting the computer in safe mode (looking up storage in safe mode then back in normal mode a few times) only freed up 2 GBs
• I never use the Spotlight search bar
• I saw someone else's post here in the forum saying that turning off FileVault could help. So I'm doing that rn. The decryption will only take about 12 hours. ?⏳
I was running out of disk space, so I dug in some old folders, deleted pictures, cleared the trash, etc. My personal data storage dropped from ~30 to 15 GB of document data. ?
But as soon as I did that, the System Storage (which was taking around 45 GB in space) is now taking 75 GBs!!! ? That number has been fluctuating around 70~80 GBs (very fast btw depending on what I'm doing), but it used to be way below that this morning. So now I have even less overall space than when I started cleaning up!
What's going on?
I ran CleanMyMac X and cleared up some system junk and cache files. But somehow, the "System storage" yellow bar keeps going up. ⏫⏫⏫ I already restarted the MacBook two times.
Looking up online, I considered it might be some Time Machine snapshot files taking up space. But I ran sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots / and sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates / it didn't show anything, so I don't think that's the case. CleanMyMac X doesn't detect any malware either.
Any ideas on how to backtrack where the excessive storage is coming from? And why the hell the system decided to take up more space after I deleted my personal files?
UPDATE - more info:
• The method of restarting the computer in safe mode (looking up storage in safe mode then back in normal mode a few times) only freed up 2 GBs
• I never use the Spotlight search bar
• I saw someone else's post here in the forum saying that turning off FileVault could help. So I'm doing that rn. The decryption will only take about 12 hours. ?⏳
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