System data taking up too much space
Why is my system data taking up so much space? I've already cleaned the junk, cleared the cache but it doesn't seem to make much difference.
iPhone 17, iOS 26
Question marked as
You can’t directly manage the contents of system data. That is done by macOS. The category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac.
What you can do to create more free space:
• Empty the Trash in the Dock.
• Empty the trash in the Photos app.
• Delete unused and unneeded application installers from your downloads folder and desktop. No need to store on your Mac what you can freely download any time.
• Reboot your Mac at least weekly. Let the OS do its housekeeping.
• Transfer files that you don’t use daily to an external drive and then delete them from the startup drive and empty the trash. Files that take up the most room are movies, images and music.
This from Apple on the subject of freeing up space:
Free up storage space on Mac - Apple Support
Also, please see the following guidance from Apple:
Find and delete files on your Mac - Apple Support
MacOS does keep a number of Time Machine snapshots on the drive as part of the backup process. These snapshots can occupy a significant amount of drive space. You can view and manage these in Disk Utility or in the Terminal app.
View APFS Snapshots is Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
You can also use apps such as DaisyDisk from Software Ambience or OmniDiskSweeper from Omni Labs to find large files on your drive. Once you've located these larger user files, you can relocate them to another drive and/or delete them if they aren't needed.