System Space (445GB)- Why so large

[ScottNWDW]

I have a 2014 iMac and not understanding why the System is taking up 445GB. On my new MacBook Pro, system is only 24.42GB Both Machines are running macOS Sierra 10.12.1
On the iMac....

On the 2016 MacBook Pro

 

[Weaselboy]

Try reindexing Spotlight by running the command below in Terminal. Give it a while to complete.

That readout gets its info from the Spotlight index, and sometimes that index gets corrupted and it causes the readout to be all wrong.

sudo mdutil -E /

Disconnect your external drive before you do this.

 

[bernuli]

Can you post the output of

sudo du -xhc -d 1 /

 

[ScottNWDW]

Can you post the output of

sudo
279248 /.DocumentRevisions-V100

468424 /.DocumentRevisions-V100 (from old Mac)

504 /.fseventsd

0 /.PKInstallSandboxManager

2298160 /.PKInstallSandboxManager-SystemSoftware

16 /.Spotlight-V100

0 /.Trashes

0 /.vol

du -xhc -d 1 /

 

[bernuli]

I don't understand the output you are getting from that command, You should see something like :

users-Mac:~ user$ sudo du -xhc -d 1 /
192K /.fseventsd
64M /.Spotlight-V100
0B /.Trashes
0B /.vol
598M /Applications
2.5M /bin
0B /cores
4.5K /dev
1.0K /home
825M /Library
1.0K /net
0B /Network
1.2G /private
1.0M /sbin
4.7G /System
141M /Users
409M /usr
4.0K /Volumes
7.9G /
7.9G total
users-Mac:~ user$

 

[maflynn]

An easier way to see what's going on is this:
Download and use OmniDiskSweeper. It will provide a sorted list of what's consuming your space.

If you run it with sudo in the terminal (As shown below), it will include some system files that it woud not normally have access to scan. That is a more accurate representation of what's consuming your drive.

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper