Help For: System Data Enormous Sizes On Macbook Pro's & Cleaning App Questions!

[Ben J.]

Hi Ben J,

Being a novice & not computer tech savvy, I always had no way of ever finding out what was this System Data that was taking up so much space & even if I found out, much seem written in code form so I would still be clueless.

Due to this, I bought an App that is an absolute Life Saver for a novice like me as it was able to identify exactly what is on your drive & where/what size & also identify each individual file/thing. That App is called "DaisyDisk" - it is a paid app but very affordable indeed - about $10. It is very easy to use & can also do deep scans to find hidden files.

It was with this, that I found out that in my case on both my Mac's - nearly all of this mysterious System Data was taken up by mainly Mail files & hence this thread for help/advice.

I hope this helps!

Thanks. Yes Daisydisk is great. Lets you get a quick overview of what's taking up storage. Simply by sorting folders by size. Makes it easy to spot anomalies, like; "I forgot to delete this duplicate movies folder".

But what exactly did you do? Delete folders inside Daisydisk, delete them in Finder? And what folders did you delete?

 

[Bazzy]

Thanks. Yes Daisydisk is great. Lets you get a quick overview of what's taking up storage. Simply by sorting folders by size. Makes it easy to spot anomalies, like; "I forgot to delete this duplicate movies folder".

But what exactly did you do? Delete folders inside Daisydisk, delete them in Finder? And what folders did you delete?

Hi Ben J

All my System Data Files were in Mail so I already knew they were all Mail related ones.

I did a number of things - I found that by copying the files into a new folder & then opening each file via Quicklook allowed me to see exactly what that file was or email was in my case.

I also tried opening the files directly but on my old machine, it was taking a long time & creating beachballs all the time. I think I also opened them up via DaisyDisk to then see exactly what each file was - I could then be certain or not whether I can delete them.

Now, I had over 300GB of these so not possible to check each & everyone so selected many randomly & they were all just emails from companies who send you advertising for this or that offer or old emails. On some files, you did not even have to open as in the gobble-de-gook computer code language in the file name - one could clearly see who they were from & which company.

As for other types of files, I do not know as my issue was only with Mail files making up all my System Data.

Hope that helps!