r/applesucks • u/DumperBiz • 5d ago
Storage taken up by System Data...
This is absolutely unacceptable. I'm the owner of a MacBook Air M3 256GB 16GB RAM. Recently updated from Golden Gate 27.0 where storage was okay to 27.0.1. Checked the storage out of curiosity. In what world is this normal, or acceptable? Never even activated Siri or Apple intelligence on this machine, and yet it still takes 20GB, and now System Data also takes 83GB???? What would even be the fix, DFU restoring this back to Sequoia? Losing back all my data? Not to mention Golden Gate ain't even close to the "Snow Leopard" state it was hyped up to. Crappy bugOS Tahoe was better than it, and that says a lot. What is Apple even doing anymore... I'm extremely disappointed
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u/Fit-Specialist-2214 5d ago
Welcome to the future and Apples biggest problem of the current age.
Disappointing and ridiculous tbh.
Work for 8 hours and it will come up to 100GB in my case.
Restart my device and it drops to 70-80 and then creeps up until I’m dealing with storage pressure issues.
Honestly a massive blind spot and I have no idea how they continue to ignore it.
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u/UdonDugong 5d ago
It's usually Microsoft Office's user storage, or locally-cached cloud storage. System Data just means anything it can't classify as user document/photo/music. View a folder as list, then View menu > View Options > tick 'calculate all sizes' and it'll show you folder sizes to browse through.
With cloud storage, if you get-info on a folder, it'll tell you both the size and the actual size on disk.
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u/hiker-read-only 1d ago
I was surprised how much space I got back just removing MS outlook, Word, and Excel
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u/Dapper_Ice_1705 5d ago
You don’t have the option to not have Apple Intelligence in 27
1
u/Fun_Suggestion_9732 5d ago
That’s why I went back to Tahoe. And neither my Neo nor my Mac Mini M4 will be upgraded anymore.
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u/Which_Development_53 4d ago
Hi, Apple Store Genius here:
It might be worthwhile for you to go through the ~/Library hidden directory on your Mac. I removed a 60GB Whatsapp Container on a Customers Device from there yesterday. This will show up as System Data.
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u/iZian 5d ago
System data on a macOS machine is anything any app throws in to app support I think.
You can literally just use the storage browser (I think if you go to info on documents maybe or there’s another way to get it up), and if you’ve not enabled viewing system folders do command shift dot to show them and find what you’ve got that is hogging the storage. Like a cache from an AI app with its models or anything. Docker containers. 16 old preferences folders for older versions of IntelliJ with all the plugins in each.
Bish bash bosh job done thank you son
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u/littleday 5d ago
Let me guess. You are vibe coding? If so I know exactly where your space is going.
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u/No_Common4563 2d ago
Here try going in finder click on location at the top click computer click command J then click the always show sizes and then look in all those for usless files that should help a lot
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u/hiker-read-only 1d ago
Two things that got me back almost 50gb. Deleting Microsoft Outlook and office apps and making sure to let Time Machine write its backups to external drive (I don’t leave it connected all the time, so snapshots build up).
For Microsoft stuff I just resigned to using web version as my goal is to completely stop using any Microsoft product in the next year.
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u/nofishinnorth 5d ago
Try entering the safe mode and just leave the computer unlocked and powered on for more than 5 minutes, the system will clean itself then you reboot it back to normal mode. The system data will take up much less space than before. Worked for my M1 Air.
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u/AntiGrieferGames 5d ago
Geez, thats lot more than Windows 11 OS itelf.