System Storage

[West1576]

My Mac running Sierra has 255 GB of system storage. I have cleaned out backup archives and run cleanmymac and still have this much system storage left. Any ideas?

 

[ferrarr]

Maybe you can provide a little more specs of your Mac?

How much space are you looking to have?



Bob -

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[Rod]

Sorry I'm confused, are you saying you have 255Gb in total (perhaps you mean 256), or are you saying you have 255Gb empty?
Go to your Apple menu, have a look at About This Mac and send us the specs of your device and the readings from the Storage tab in the same menu, not to mention your concern because I'm not to sure what that is.


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[West1576]

Sorry to be confusing. I have a 500GB hard drive. 68 GB iTunes. 60 GB for parallels. 17 GB documents. 17 GB apps. 24 GB other stuff. 253 GB of system storage. That’s more than half of my drive! Way too much


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[Rod]

I don't think I've ever had much less than half my total storage in constant use. Out of a total of 500Gb storage on my MBP I only have around 180Gb free. I think that's pretty normal.


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[Rod]

I do perform regular cleanups and there have been times where I have had over 200Gb free but this MBP is a product of many years of accumulated data and preceding MBP's. I do offload large media files onto external drives and like you I use CMM3 to remove old large files.
Are you running High Sierra or Mojave because in the Apple menu under the storage tab you will see a "Manage" option. It's worth having a look at this, it gives you access to just about everything stored on your device and the option to delete. Just make sure you know what these files are before you delete them. There are other things you can do to clear storage but if you have half of your storage free you're doing pretty well I think.


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[MacInWin]

Do you have Time Machine set to automatically back up and is the drive attached? If the answers are yes, TM is running and No, the drive is not attached, you may have snapshots of the drive taking up that space. To clear it out, do a TM backup and the snapshots should be cleaned up after the backup is done.

To avoid them in the future, go to System Preferences and uncheck the box for TM to back up automatically. That action will stop the snapshots.

 

[pm-r]

Sorry to be confusing. I have a 500GB hard drive. 68 GB iTunes. 60 GB for parallels. 17 GB documents. 17 GB apps. 24 GB other stuff. 253 GB of system storage. That’s more than half of my drive! Way too much

Hmmm...??? My Calculator says those amounts add up to a total used amount of 439GB!!!

That would translate, in practical figures of a 500GB HDD, to be getting quite close to being considered FULL!!!



- Patrick
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[Rod]

Should have added it up myself. I made the assumption that the total free storage was the 253Gb mentioned. If on the other hand you add the 253Gb to the rest you do get an almost full SSD. So which way is it?


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[MacInWin]

But a question is how much is shown as "purgeable?" I, too, am showing System of 355 GB on my 1TB SSD, but then Get Info says that there is 213GB of purgeable, which I presume means that if the system needs it, would be purged to make more available.

Frankly, ever since APFS, I don't think storage measures mean the same as they used to. APFS numbers just don't seem to add up.

 

[krs]

I don't think I've ever had much less than half my total storage in constant use. Out of a total of 500Gb storage on my MBP I only have around 180Gb free. I think that's pretty normal.

I have 500 GB as my internal drive as well and currently 64 GB free.
I try to keep 100 GB free (obviously need a bit of clean up), but even with 64 GB free there are no problems.

I remember years ago I ended up with a REALLY full drive, I had downloaded some application (can't remember which one) that generated logs like crazy and filled up my hard drive.
The Mac gave me a warning message that there were only a few MB (as in Megabytes!) free space left.
I still managed to recover without any problems.

I'm not suggesting that one fills up their hard drive to that level; I try to keep 100 GB free, but that is not a hard and fast number - obviously for me 64 GB free is still perfectly fine.

 

[MacInWin]

Good numbers are, in general, 10-15% for a spinner, 5% for an SSD.

 

[pm-r]

Good numbers are, in general, 10-15% for a spinner, 5% for an SSD.

Why are percentages still used so much??? And why would larger drives even need to have such suggested larger amounts kept available???

Maybe one day, someone can produce some valid size(s) and the reason, especially if there are any for various size drives.

The last I read, depending on the file types the user is using, that an HDD can manage quite well with only 10GB drive space available, and SSDs with even less.

But fragmentation can also enter the situation even though the Mac OS X system attempts to eliminate a lot of it the best it can, it's far from perfect.

Anyway, this is getting off-topic but I just thought I would mention it.



- Patrick
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[krs]

Well, it's not that much off topic.......

But it's definitely a subject I'm sure a lot of people are interested in - what is the minimum empty drive space on macOS one should have available.

I was just resurrecting an older, I think 2008, MacBook pro.
It came with a 120 GB drive, so in that case 12 to 18 GB free space would have been considered adequate (at 10 - 15%)
But I also max out the RAM on Macs I have so there is essentially no memory swapping with the hard drive - I assume that would also determine the minimum free space required.

And as I mentioned before, I once ended up with only megabytes of free space and the Mac complained, but soldiered on nonetheless.

One of the reasons I think we should have a bit more "free space" now than 10 years ago is because files we store seem to get much bigger.
So it doesn't take a lot of "multi-media" files to add up to 10 or 15 GB

 

[Rod]

Yep, sizes have certainly changed a lot. One of our Australian ISP's is offering 45Gb in 35 days as a special offer. I cannot imagine how I could une that much download in 35 days but obviously some can.


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[Rod]

Just as an addit to this thread. I had a number of old backups in iMazing and noticed after doing at bit of a search I had several iMazing Versions folders in different places. Maybe the default location got mucked up somehow as i had made a few backups for other people. Anyway as I was unable to work out which ones were which and my iOS devices are backed up to iCloud as well I thought rather than download the current update I would just delete all of my iMazing files, backup folders and the app itself and download the new version an start over. This was a bit of a surprise because all together that came to 69Gb. i now have 229Gb free on my SSD.

 

[chscag]

I love iMazing 2 but one does have to be careful not to let backups accumulate over time. Unlike iTunes, it will store backups of every iOS device for as long as you have room. You do need to purge those backups every now and then.

 

[pm-r]

I love iMazing 2 but one does have to be careful not to let backups accumulate over time. Unlike iTunes, it will store backups of every iOS device for as long as you have room. You do need to purge those backups every now and then.

+1!!
But it would be really nice if iMazing 2 had a button to the actual Backup Path: or at least to get to the "Enclosing folder" to make any surplus BackUp deletions easier.


- Patrick
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[MacInWin]

In iMazing Preferences, under "Backups" is the location to where the backups are stored.

 

[IWT]

@Charlie and Patrick

iMazing 2 does do both things:

In its preferences, you can select "where" you want to store the backups (ie your back up path, Patrick), and you can instruct iMazing to keep no more than a certain number of backups (in my case 6) and auto-delete or request-delete the oldest BU when you come to the 7th.

I think you can also tell it to keep BUs on a time-focussed basis - say, not more than one month - if you prefer that way over number of previous BUs.

So there is some flexibility available.

Ian