Hi,
My 2017 MacBook Air is running on Mojave version 10.14.6. I works well enough, but I've had issues with not having enough storage space. Checking my storage I saw that the "system" uses 94.6 GB out of 121.12 GB available in the HD.
I've tried to look up fixes but haven't been able to find any that work. Any idea how I could go about clearing most of it up?
Thanks in advance.
MacBook Air (2018 – 2020)
Thank you for your advice! Though they weren't the problem.
I managed to clear 40 GB of space by using the program "OmniDiskSweeper" to access files and folders (mostly caches or versions of programs and files). It worked well enough for me, in case anyone else stumbles onto this thread.
Take care of which files you delete though. Make sure it's fine ...
I'll try to give s much info that I've collected n it...
4 suggestions…
Look for iOS backups…
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.
https://www.omnigroup.com/more/
Purging local backups
Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.
Start Terminal from spotlight.
At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates.
Hit enter.
Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.
Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.
Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.
Hit enter.
Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required
http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / # deletes all the snapshots
Thanks to BobHarris file sizes, Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal:...
sudo du -hx | sort -h
sudo du -hx ~/| sort -h
I've literally had the same problem - and I've had this several times throughout the lifetime of my macbook air.
What I do (and it always works) - is every 2-3 years, I back up any files that I want to keep on an external hard drive, completely WIPE my MacBook, then reinstall applications / files that I need. The system file is tiny now, and my MacBook feels as good as new. (Well, as new as a 9 1/2 year old machine can feel - but everything's running super smoothly now!)
Good work, great to hear my friend, thanks. :)
Mojave 10.14: System storage scarily high
