Sequoia and system data

[Dave_O]

It's quite possible that Spotlight / AI will use as much local storage as makes sense for the amount of free storage, and purge data as needed.

Just speculation

 

[jgdeschamps]

Sorry for resurrecting last year's thread on Sequoia+System Data, but after updating to version 15.3 last week, I noticed since yesterday that I'm having the exact opposite problem of what's expressed in this thread: my M2 MacBook Air is increasing available space, and there is NO System Data block. Has anyone experienced this? My available space went from 146GB to 206.3GB since yesterday. It's now at 209.21GB of available space. Again, Settings show no sign of the System Data block. I restarted a few hours ago to check if it was some sort of indexing issue, but available space is still there. The laptop is performing without hiccups or glitches, so I don't think I'm having some sort of SSD failure... it's definitely a bug, but a good one that does not need squashing (after my edits, it does need to be taking care of.) I wish I took yesterday's screenshot, but I thought it was some sort of Finder refresh problem. Took some screen caps and attached them to this message as reference of the "problem." Any ideas?

Edit: None of my files, mails or photos are lost, BTW. Didn't loose info at all.

Edit 2: It was caused by Apple Intelligence. If you agree to use it, install it, and then disable it... you'll probably get this behavior. Also, the available space is miscalculated. I actually had 189GB left after manually calculating it. Solution from Apple Support is to reinstall macOS from scratch.

 

[soveet]

got a new basic MacBook Pro m3 18gb/512gb and was running the preinstalled macOS well and settled on 300gb free from the 494.4gb as registered after days of leaving it to settle any iCloud downloads etc.

Upon installing sequoia last week, my free space is down to 24gb. Mac hasn't been used for the better part but noticed the system data part in the storage settings page is not 339.43gb.

Any idea before I format the thing and try again? Many thanks

Go to this link and follow steps to disable spotlight. I just did and reclaimed 160 GB on my iMac with 512 SSD.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1dfo2sl/ridiculously_high_disk_write_rate_from_unknown

Get Raycast as an alternative to Spotlight. It is free and does much more.