148 GB of invisible “System Data”

I JUST fixed this problem on my Mac Mini M1.

I have just 256 of internal SSD, and I only use it for xcode development and nothing more, but up until this morning I had only 2GB free, where I should have more than 100GB free. After deleting some crap, I was able to get 38GB of free disk space... but it should be more!

In Preferences->General->Storage, I had more than 117GB of SYSTEM DATA!! WTF?

After looking on the web and finding LOADS of people with the same problem, none of the tips where useful to me, since there was no way to find WHERE the **** missing space was.

So, I downloaded Omnidisksweeper (its free btw), just to try to find the actual disk space of every folder in my disk.

Omnidisksweeper was reporting that all the files on my disk where using 102GB. Since 102+117(system data)=219GB, it clearly means Omnidisksweeper is missing whatever is reported as system data.

Then I found the Preferences->Privacy&Security->FullDiskAccess setup, and I enabled it for Omnidisksweeper. (I enabled the Terminal app as well, just in case, so if I need to look into places that are blocked from the terminal, I can)

After that, Omnidisksweeper FINALLY found 225GB in use instead of 102GB! So basically, this **** Preferences->Privacy&Security->FullDiskAccess is blocking every app from actually see the "system data" files, so there's no way we can find what needs to go without Preferences->Privacy&Security->FullDiskAccess.

And to my surprise, 86GB where in the .Trash folder of my home user folder. The thing is: My trashcan was reporting as empty! I had emptied the trashcan and it shouldn't be anything in there, but now Omnidisksweeper is telling me there's 86GB in there!

I went to the terminal, and run "ls -l ~/.Trash/", and I got the message "permission denied". So, I can't look into my own .Trash folder now.

So I tried using "sudo ls -l ~/.Trash", and running as root with sudo, I was able to see all the files in there. It was all there, the Trashcan was full and using 86GB of my disk, and there was nothing I could do from Finder!!

so, using the terminal, I ran :

    sudo rm -rfv ~/.Trash/* 

and it finally actually deleted all the files in the Trash!!

Now I have 114GB of free disk space!!

System Data is still reporting 36GB which I still have to find where it is, but at least the bulk of those 117GB of "System Data" is gone.

So, maybe what's happening to you is the same that happened to me... you may have tons of files in the Trash, but it reports as empty... but in fact, it's not!

Try to run

sudo rm -rfv ~/.Trash/*

and see if that frees up anything for you!

In case this command with sudo says something like "permission denied", go to Preferences->Privacy&Security->FullDiskAccess and enable the Terminal app.

If this actually frees up space for you, you should run these commands too:

sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) ~/.Trash
sudo chmod a-rwx ~/.Trash
sudo chmod u+rwx ~/.Trash

to prevent this from happening again. These command will make sure the permissions in your Trashcan folder are correct.

hope this helps other people...

-H

sudo rm -rfv ~/.Trash/*

zsh: no matches found: /Users/tsi/.Trash/*

I'm having the same issue. :/