System Data Partition Huge After Monterey Reinstall

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Level 1

20 points

System Data Partition Huge After Monterey Reinstall

I encountered a black screen of death in Monterey 12.4 and tried everything I could to resolve it to no avail. Thankfully I had a fresh Carbon Copy Cloner backup and decided just to wipe the internal drive and reinstall the OS from Recovery Mode. I did so, and restored the backup. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly until I checked my disk with Disk Utility: for some reason, even though this was a one to one migration to a fresh installation of Monterey on a zeroed disk, the data partition of my internal drive has gobbled up an extra 100 GB of space. I do not know why, and I do not know how to remedy it. I am running Monterey 12.4 on a Mac Studio, and any help would be greatly appreciated!

Mac Studio

Posted on Jul 17, 2022 10:54 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

PRP_53

Level 10

91,807 points

Jul 17, 2022 2:15 PM in response to Jamie Berry

Firstly, under normal drive configurations, the Internal Drive has Only One Partition which is the Entire Drive Capacity.

There are additional Volumes which can be view by Terminal Command diskutil list

Good work 👍 and pleased the CCC Application came to the rescue

Notation regarding Drive filling up especially if CCC is used and configured to use the " SafetyNet " feature of CCC.

Would suggest checking the Developers Website specific to CCC

CCC SafetyNet may need to be tweaked to make fewer or no Snap Shot.

They will accumulate over time and if not moved in a CCC Process will start to occupy needed space resulting in your original issue

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Answer 2

Mal-S

Level 5

4,990 points

Jul 17, 2022 1:12 PM in response to Jamie Berry

The first thing to do is restart in Safe Mode, in doing so the Mac will preform maintenance processes which may reduce redundant System Data.

Also regularly shut down the Mac if you normally leave if running.

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Answer 3

Jamie Berry Author

Level 1

20 points

Jul 17, 2022 2:23 PM in response to PRP_53

Yes, I guess I was referring to the containers rather than partitions per se. I'll see about a potential SafetyNet issue. Barring that, should I wipe the drive and try another fresh install? I'm still missing 100GB that was there the day before the incident.

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Answer 4

Jamie Berry Author

Level 1

20 points

Jul 17, 2022 2:46 PM in response to PRP_53

Ok. Thank you Mal-S and P Philips. This was indeed a SafetyNet issue, I had a couple of snapshots that got copied over in my migration. Between your replies and the CCC documentation I figured out how to delete them, and I've got the disk space back. I think SafetyNet inadvertently was reenabled when I first got the Mac Studio and was setting it up afresh. I appreciate the insights on both Safe Mode and how modern Mac OS and CCC utilize disk space. Thanks very much.

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