MacBook Air 13“ M1 OS accumulating hughe system files

[Willybecher]

Hi everyone,

I tried to search the forum, cause I‘m sure I‘m not alone.
I have an issue with my work laptop.
M1 Air 13“ 16/256GB

When I run Adobe products it gets really slow, klicks in Premiere don‘t execute on first try, eg right click on a file in timeline to call the menu. I checked RAM during use, but from my perspective there‘s no issue running on 10-12GB and having still 4-6GB free memory… But the SSD has accumulated system files and the drive has only 20GB of free memory…

How do I get rid of those 80GB system files?
I did a complete clean install and restored from a backup… Seemann those System files are backedup also 🫣

The internet lead to some terminal tools and I could delete about 5GB, still having those 7xGB of files there.

Any recommendations?

Thank you.
Sorry if this was already discusses I checked some parts of the forum but couldnt find anything matching with the search Tool …

 

[hristob]

Time Machine local snapshots and Xcode caches are usually the culprits. I deleted all the files & folders in ~/Library/Caches and immediately freed 200+ GB worth of System Data. So yeah. Try that.

 

[lwilliams]

I tried that and nothing changed.

.

 

[maflynn]

Download OmniDisk Sweeper
From the terminal run the following command

Sudo open /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app

So OmniDiskSweeper scans your drive and you get to see what's consuming your space, it normally runs under your privileges which prevents you from scanning the system files. By running it from the terminal within sudo, you temporarily give it elevated privileges

.

 

[Willybecher]

Thank you for your input… Yes ODS is installiere but deleting files I don’t know what purpose they have seemed a bit hard for me … cash folder had about 5GB, I deleted that. Maybe a clean install is the best and then get some files over from backup without copying all the Junk?

 

[Vincent Hanna]

System File bloat as been an issue on Macs for 20 years. The only real solution I’ve ever seen is nuke and pave.

Inconvenient and time consuming, but it’s the only way to reliably get back those 50GB+ of disk space.