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why 70% of memory space of my mac is been taken?

Hi

I was trying to update my mac but as I do not have enough space i am not able to update it .

I was wondering why why 70% of storage is taken by system?

Posted on Sep 1, 2021 8:24 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 1, 2021 8:40 AM

Boot into Safe Mode, and try again.


That will clean up temporary files and will rebuild caches and will shut off some add-on apps.


Unfortunately—if this is a bottom-end Mac storage configuration—available storage probably remains constrained.

4 replies

Sep 1, 2021 8:42 AM in response to pegah97

EDIT: I would start with MrHoffman's excellent suggestions first.


In theory, macOS immediately frees blocks that are deleted, including system files. It also sends a message to the SSD drive controller (called TRIM commands) telling it which blocks no longer contain useful data and can be re-used. The SSD drive controller is the only device that gets involved in garbage collecting these blocks, re-assembling them into pre-erased super-blocks, and re-using them.

System includes:

  • Time Machine local snapshots, but are marked as 'purgeable' and should not be removed manually.
  • However, if you wish to do so, use the following commands in the Terminal app:
    • To get a list of current snapshots: sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
    • To delete individual snapshots: tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <enter the snapshot>
  • Spotlight Indexing
  • iCloud Storage of infrequently-used files

Sep 1, 2021 9:12 AM in response to Tesserax

FWIW: The TRIM performance-optimization storage command is used by macOS when a file is deleted from SSD storage, and the operation is transparent to the user, and does not effect any displayed allocated- or free-storage counts. TRIM informs the SSD that the user is done using that region of storage, and that storage can then be made ready for quick re-use. SSDs can’t overwrite the same storage (which also means the old-style hard disk drive storage overwrites for data security reasons don’t work the same), and the SSD storage erase operation is comparatively slow, and TRIM is a way to avoid the user having to wait for the erase and the overwrite when some or all of a file is re-written. TRIM is not a factor in user storage usage.

why 70% of memory space of my mac is been taken?

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