Sierra gives more HDD space?

[Freida]

So I get persuaded to install the beta and before the update I had 18GB free space.
After the update I have 54GB.

Do you know where the system took so much free space, please? I'm little bit worried that it deleted something (I do have a back up but don't wanna restore unless its confirmed)
Would you know how this could happen, please?

 

[arggg14]

Nothing was deleted. The new OS install cleaned out junk left behind.

 

[Freida]

Nothing was deleted. The new OS install cleaned out junk left behind.

30GB though? Thats insane
So how much space did others get?

 

[Icaras]

Yea that's around the same amount of space I claimed back as well. Had around 35 gigs left and came back after the Sierra install with over 70GB free. It's definitely started me off with a positive look on Sierra so far

 

[grahamperrin]

before the update I had 18GB free space.

Maybe some of that non-free space was taken by swap files.

 

[redheeler]

A similar occurrence happened on my rMBP after installing Sierra beta 1, the amount of free space had tripled to over 40 GB. It's hard to believe that much space was taken up by swap and cache files.

 

[twanj]

I went from about 20 GB free to 40 GB free. I also noticed Garageband was taking up 2 GB so I was able to delete that too.

 

[Gjwilly]

I gained about 14GB.

 

[Freida]

Interesting. I wonder what all that free space was. It couldn't be that cluttered, don't you think?

 

[grahamperrin]

Lion above, relatively large Sierra below (I don't have any other installers handy):



11.2 GiB uncompressed in that view of the installer.

Without inviestigating futher, a lazy guess: AppleFSCompression is more aggressive and/or more widespread than it is in El Capitan.

 

[grahamperrin]

Disk spaces used by /System

A Mavericks example :

Mashemite:~ grahamperrin$ date ; sudo du -hs /Volumes/10.9.5/System
Sat  9 Jul 2016 19:28:25 BST
Password:
6.3G   /Volumes/10.9.5/System
Mashemite:~ grahamperrin$ sudo find /Volumes/10.9.5/System -type f | wc -l
Password:
  229771
Mashemite:~ grahamperrin$

A Sierra example:

Mashemite:~ grahamperrin$ date ; sw_vers
Sat  9 Jul 2016 19:27:23 BST
ProductName:   Mac OS X
ProductVersion:   10.12
BuildVersion:   16A239m
Mashemite:~ grahamperrin$ sudo du -hs /System
Password:
4.9G   /System
Mashemite:~ grahamperrin$ sudo find /System -type f | wc -l
Password:
  228989
Mashemite:~ grahamperrin$

 

[adonis3k]

I had around 30GB free on Mav and now have 107GB Free!

 

[flowrider]

I have multiple drives. Two of my SSDs (same capacity) with essentially the same information except one is my El Cap BackUp, it contains 31GB less free space then my Sierra boot SSD.

Lou

 

[smartalic34]

I actually lost space, going from 89GB to 75GB free...