~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents using a lot of disk space

The title says it all. I'm running a 2018 MacMini on macOS Sequoia 15.2 with a 500GB drive, and this folder is consuming 150GB. The folder structure is then index.V2/journals/, followed by a 10 or 11, and then two folders: cs_default and cs_priority. The cs_default folders are filled with literally thousands of files starting with the title skg_events, and ending with extensions .toc or .journal. The modification dates start at Sept. 17, 2024, which I think is roughly when I first installed Sequoia.

I've tried a few things - stopping/starting Spotlight (but have not yet tried reindexing) and restarting in SafeMode.

EtreCheck report attached - yes, I have a lot of *stuff* on my system that affects

EtreCheck Report

performance, but I'm really trying to figure out how to reclaim this disk space if possible. I appreciate your help!

Mac mini (2018)

Posted on Dec 26, 2024 6:57 PM

Top-ranking reply

Mac Jim ID

Level 9

60,656 points

Posted on Dec 27, 2024 7:28 AM

I have both folders you are referring to and SpotlightKnowledgeEvents is sitting at 2.3 GB and CoreSpotlight is just shy of 1GB. I would suggest to exclude the drives you do not want to index and then reindex spotlight. Not every drive needs indexing depending on your use case.

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

The combination of the additional drives to index along with the disk related apps creating more files to index is going to add to the Spotlight index. I would take a closer look at those apps as the poor write speed you are experiencing is due to those apps constantly writing files that require spotlight to index them, increasing your data graph.

It will take some troubleshooting to see if those apps are contributing to the increased index size.

Disk Drill
SoftRaid
TTP

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65 replies

Jan 24, 2025 4:01 PM in response to Stephen Epstein

Stephen Epstein wrote:

I only have an Intel MacMini (2018). Can anyone confirm that this problem is limited to Intel Macs? Maybe we're on to something with a Sequoia bug that only affects Intel Macs, and not Apple Silicon.

I believe it affects Apple Silicon Macs as well, but to a much lesser extent. My M2 Max MacBook Pro's SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder has about 42 GB of data in it, and my Mac Studio M1 Ultra has about 8 GB in the same folder. I'm not sure why the MBP has so much more metadata; it actually has a smaller user folder than the Mac Studio.

But both are significantly smaller than the 500+ GB on my two Intel Macs.

XRoom

Level 1

4 points

Jan 29, 2025 12:08 AM in response to ericmurphysf

I upgraded to 15.3 last night, but everything seems to be the same. The "~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents" folder keeps growing. A couple of days ago I deleted files older than two days, and I will continue to do the same as long as this continues.

OliOS2

Level 1

14 points

Feb 17, 2025 7:33 AM in response to southtom

I am also facing this problem. I have an Intel iMac 2019, running Sequioa 15.3.1.

My SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder is 80 GB.

I went through my TimeMachine and figured out, that this folder didn't exists before Sequioa.

The index.V2 folder within the folder SpotlightKnowledgeEvents contains a folder "journals" which contains two folders:

"10" with 20 GB of data
"11" with 60 GB of data

The files of the folder "10" where updated the last time at the end of October 2024. My assumption is, that the "10" folder is from Sonoma.

Please Apple, fix this problem.

Feb 26, 2025 8:33 PM in response to southtom

Mac mini 2018, Intel Core i5, Sequoia 15.3. Using eGPU. Recently something was eating free space and it indeed was SpotlightKnowledgeEvents. cs_priority 2-3 GB, cs_default 60-80 GB. After deleting it fills again in a few days.

Apr 3, 2025 2:06 PM in response to nxnw

It's only been a few hours since I updated to 15.4, but so far the signs, at least on my Intel 27-inch iMac, are not encouraging. CoreSpotlightd isn't using much CPU time (7% on an 8-core system with hyperthreading turned on), but immediately after the update the (relocated) CoreSpotlight metadata was at around 2.6 GB (I'd deleted it all last night before the update to 15.4). It's now about two and a half hours later, and already metadata is up to 24.3 GB (with a large Pages file open). Before 15.4, after deleting metadata it would typically take closer to two days to get to 24 GB. If anything 15.4 seems to have worsened the problem of extremely rapid buildup of Spotlight metadata.

The next experiment will be to quit Pages for a while and see if metadata comes down in size. I've seen this many times on Apple Silicon systems, but the only way I've ever been able to reduce the size of Spotlight metadata on Intel systems is by manually deleting it.

dialabrain

Level 10

135,935 points

Dec 27, 2024 6:39 AM in response to Stephen Epstein

Just took a closer look. As you can see, I have no "10" folder or "cs_default" folder. And all my cs.*** folders are empty. I'm guessing to can delete the "10" folder and empty the .cs folders.

Dec 27, 2024 6:52 AM in response to dialabrain

I also have that path (~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents), but there is also a much larger folder at ~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents. Maybe you don't have that folder? My CoreSpotlight folder is only 3.4GB - larger than your 80MB, but not nearly the 150GB of the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder at ~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents!

I'm not sure what's needed or not either - hence my post!

Dec 27, 2024 9:45 AM in response to Mac Jim ID

Maybe not the right move - I'm rebuilding the Spotlight index and excluded a few drives. The result is that the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents file is growing (another 3GB so far).

I've removed TTP. SoftRAID isn't likely to be the issue (though I can check with OWC). I'll be checking Disk Drill next.

XRoom

Level 1

4 points

Jan 23, 2025 11:42 AM in response to Stephen Epstein

Hi,

My folder "~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/index.V2/journals/11/cs_default" has 4104 files, and is consuming 100GB.

The first file is from December 11th at 10:10 p.m., and at that time the operating system was updated to version 15.2.

I am convinced that this is a problem with the Sequoia 15.2 version (24C101)

Any ideas what I can do?

Thx a lot!

XRoom

Level 1

4 points

Jan 24, 2025 3:08 AM in response to Stephen Epstein

EtreCheck Report

I attach an EtreCheckReport.

As I already mentioned, my folder "~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/index.V2/journals/11/cs_default" has more than 4100 files, and is consuming around 100GB.

The first file is from December 11th at 10:10 p.m., and at that time the operating system was updated to version 15.2.

I am convinced that this is a problem with the Sequoia 15.2 version (24C101)

Apple Support has told me to follow the usual steps of deleting Safari cookies and restoring the system.

For me, restoring the system is not an option and deleting the cookies is not going to help. I don't think it will help at all.

Regards

Jan 24, 2025 10:23 AM in response to Mac Jim ID

I'll give it a look. As with others, the problem seems to have started with Sequoia, and pre-dates my using DEVONThink for archiving, but the problem accelerated as I started archiving.

Maybe part of the problem, but not all of it.

XRoom

Level 1

4 points

Jan 27, 2025 2:28 AM in response to mallen_79

What is your Sequoia version? Is it "15.2 (24C101)"?

My problematic folder is: "~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/index.V2/journals/11/cs_default"

Folder "SpotlightKnowledgeEvents" under "CoreSpotlight", has only 8KB, and has not "journals" folder under "index.V2"

Feb 5, 2025 11:17 PM in response to XRoom

For all is worth, in my iMac (M1) in

~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/index.V2/journals/11

I have 6kb of data.

I do NOT use Apple Mail at all.

~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents

I have 6MB.

Maurizio

Feb 24, 2025 12:46 PM in response to Stephen Epstein

I am having this problem as well.

I also suspect it has to do with email indexing on Intel machines. Unfortunately my IT dept believes that 512GB is plenty for an "advanced" machine, so that 140GB represents 27% of my drive space.

This problem needs to be fixed!

Bru_D

Level 1

22 points

Mar 26, 2025 1:54 AM in response to OliOS2

I have the exact same issue and went through an apple review. At that point my hard drive was down to under 5GB remaining which was causing major issues with my *** software. We managed to remove over 100GB of data at around 5 thousand files. Since then the two folders continue to accumulate data.

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~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents using a lot of disk space