Two year old MacBook M3 with 1T drive. System data is taking up 668G...two thirds. Deleting items causes it to go up and so do not have enough space on the drive to download software to investigate or reinstall OS. All remedies I find do no help. Looking for ideas, thanks.
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 15.6
molinger wrote:
Two year old MacBook M3 with 1T drive. System data is taking up 668G...two thirds. Deleting items causes it to go up and so do not have enough space on the drive to download software to investigate or reinstall OS. All remedies I find do no help. Looking for ideas, thanks.
Try restarting your Mac in Safe Mode, as described here: Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
This will prevent most 3rd party system modifications from running. The last two people that I've seen report this problem have discovered that the Carbonite software was causing it. So Safe Mode should prevent that software from running and give you a chance to get ahead of it and delete some files.
After deleting files, it may take a day or so before the system finally cleans out the local snapshots that are holding those deleted files. You may be able to force the process by using Disk Utility > View > Show All Devices and then Show APFS Snapshots. Deleting those snapshots should give you back some space.
But all of this is merely to get ahead of the problem. Once you restart normally, it will likely return with a vengeance. You have to identify what software is causing it. I only mentioned Carbonite because two people recently identified it. But it could be literally anything. It could even be part of the operating system and Safe Mode might not help. But it can't hurt to get lucky!
molinger wrote:
Two year old MacBook M3 with 1T drive. System data is taking up 668G...two thirds. Deleting items causes it to go up and so do not have enough space on the drive to download software to investigate or reinstall OS. All remedies I find do no help. Looking for ideas, thanks.
Try restarting your Mac in Safe Mode, as described here: Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
This will prevent most 3rd party system modifications from running. The last two people that I've seen report this problem have discovered that the Carbonite software was causing it. So Safe Mode should prevent that software from running and give you a chance to get ahead of it and delete some files.
After deleting files, it may take a day or so before the system finally cleans out the local snapshots that are holding those deleted files. You may be able to force the process by using Disk Utility > View > Show All Devices and then Show APFS Snapshots. Deleting those snapshots should give you back some space.
But all of this is merely to get ahead of the problem. Once you restart normally, it will likely return with a vengeance. You have to identify what software is causing it. I only mentioned Carbonite because two people recently identified it. But it could be literally anything. It could even be part of the operating system and Safe Mode might not help. But it can't hurt to get lucky!
molinger wrote:
Two year old MacBook M3 with 1T drive. System data is taking up 668G...two thirds. Deleting items causes it to go up and so do not have enough space on the drive to download software to investigate or reinstall OS. All remedies I find do no help. Looking for ideas, thanks.
Call Customer Support (800) MY–APPLE (800–692–7753)
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Contact Apple Support - Apple Support
molinger wrote:
None of these suggestions is showing promise yet.
You hadn't mentioned Carbonite then. The solution is pretty obvious - remove Carbonite.
Cannot wrap my head around the fact that, when I selected to move documents to the cloud, system data went up proportionally.
I'm not sure what you mean there. It could mean many things. What "cloud", for example? Did you try to move 1 TB of data to the cloud? That might be problematic, especially when you have some other cloud service that is going to work hard to fill up every byte as soon as you free it.
I am prone to ask myself, what has changed lately?
Is there even any way for you to find that out? Many apps these days have automatic updates. And people today are absolutely obsessed, addicted even, to updates. In many cases, they only want the current OS update and expect any 3rd part software from previous decades to run flawlessly. But many 3rd party apps know this and install their own auto-update mechanisms. So anything can break at any time with no notice.
read this article for additional guidance:
How to free up ‘System Data’ and other st… - Apple Community
None of these suggestions is showing promise yet. Cannot wrap my head around the fact that, when I selected to move documents to the cloud, system data went up proportionally. I am prone to ask myself, what has changed lately? Carbonite, after not working for some months, suddenly began working. My becoming aware of that did not coincide with my problem by may have contributed to it? I have limited items on the computer so there is something going on that is not disk volume related, in my thinking.
Mark
Thanks...will look at this over the weekend. Carbonite is in play so we'll see., thanks.
MacBook M3 System Data full, no space for downloads
