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System space usage slowly increasing after 10.14.5

pinkoos

pinkoos

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 15, 2005
597
66
Texas
Hi

Has anybody noticed that, after updating to 10.14.5, that their system space usage has slowly started increasing day by day?

Mine increased by over 90GB over the course of a few days after updating to 10.14.5

It seems a reboot of the Mac sets the system back down to what it was before (at least rebooting worked the last couple of times)

Right now, my system has increased usage of SSD space by over 50GB since I last rebooted maybe 3 or 4 days ago

I definitely did not have this issue prior to updating

I also don't have Time Machine on nor use any kind of TM backups (I've read that TM can cause issues like this)

Thanks
 
pinkoos said:
Hi

Has anybody noticed that, after updating to 10.14.5, that their system space usage has slowly started increasing day by day?

Mine increased by over 90GB over the course of a few days after updating to 10.14.5

It seems a reboot of the Mac sets the system back down to what it was before (at least rebooting worked the last couple of times)

Right now, my system has increased usage of SSD space by over 50GB since I last rebooted maybe 3 or 4 days ago

I definitely did not have this issue prior to updating

I also don't have Time Machine on nor use any kind of TM backups (I've read that TM can cause issues like this)

Thanks
Click to expand...

TM APFS snapshots maybe?
 
I entered that code into Terminal and it didn't come back with any snapshots
 
I have Dropbox but I don't store any photos (or much else) in there...maybe 3 or 4GB worth of stuff
 
Someone suggested some time ago here OmniDiskSweeper. Very useful when looking for large amount of used space...

My "System" uses ~83GB of disk space for 10.14.5, which seemed quite a lot to me. So, I have been looking at what OminDiskSweeper finds and while there is some larger folders I do not understand why they are necessary, nothing extra crazy shows up.

I assume that anything in system Library or my own Library (e.g., "Application support") counts in "System", other locations would be "System", "private", "usr", and probably "opt". These are all folders in root directory of system drive (my own Library is in my home folder).

For example, my own Library has 22GB in it, and that contains Cache of iCloud, Mail, iOS backups,...

I could probably empty over 20GB just by deleting Xcode and its support which is in system Library. I could trim another 20Gb or more by removing specific applications and its support stuff from System Library. Like GarageBand has 2.3GB of stuff there. Speech support (two languages) is 3.4GB. And so on. At some point I installed a single large "linux" package (LaTex) in usr/local and it is 5GB.

So, combined with needed system files and needed support content, well, it can be 80Gb.

I suspect the main problem we have here is that the "System" includes things a user may not consider "System" - like the iCloud cache etc.
 
Just checked my SSD and it was at 205 GB. I rebooted and it dropped down to 133 GB. The difference is related to how much System gets bloated before rebooting and then goes back down to normal levels after the reboot.
 
So I think the culprit (or one of the culprits) was this:

https://downlinkapp.com/

It kept saving desktop png files over time, upwards of 30GB worth at one point

I've since deleted that app and I think my problem is solved or at least mostly solved
 
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