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My System Data is Crazy High at 136 GB! Please Help

Hi, I just got a pop-up on my iMac 2020/Sonoma 14.6.1 about my disc space being almost full. When I looked into my storage, my system data looks crazy high, at 136 GB! I tried following some videos about clearing cashes, thinking it was my ADOBE apps, but I only saw roughly 6 GB combined for everything in my cashes.


Does anyone have any idea where I can look to see what’s taking up so much space for system data?


Thanks!

Posted on Nov 10, 2024 2:58 PM

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2 replies

Nov 10, 2024 7:34 PM in response to Honey_Crisp_212

I use DaisyDisk to figure out where storage is being taken up. If you run it as administrator it will show you EVERYTHING. It is a paid up app, Tesserax provided a link that has some free ones.


Some Adobe image and video processing apps take up a large amount of temporary storage space. I have seen Lightroom image collections use up hundreds of GB (when the collection was about 100 GB being processed).


If you have one of those Macs with just 256 GB or 512 GB storage, then obviously 136 GB will have a big impact. DaisyDisk can help you figure this out. One option is to utilize iCloud if that makes sense for you, to offload local storage. Another option is to move large Photos Libraries or Music collections to an external drive, to free up space on the internal drive.


If you aren't using Time Machine regularly, Time Machine "snapshots" can accumulate and take up local storage. DaisyDisk and other utilities can safely delete those for you.

My System Data is Crazy High at 136 GB! Please Help

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