Hi,
I’m using the latest official release of Tahoe. This morning I realized that 50 GB of free space on my hard drive had gone missing. When I checked under System Settings > Storage I noticed that System Data was claiming 300+ GB! Is this something to be concerned about? Does anyone know if it can be reclaimed? I understand that there are real use for System Data but this amount seems wrong.
Best regards,
Björn
In the article, it said:
- Don’t expect macOS to free up any purgeable space for you.
Frankly, I’m surprise to read this. Isn’t this what a OS supposed to do?? Does it mean Apple expects user to run cryptic Terminal commands to clear up space that’s probably created by the OS?
For what it’s worth, after doing a Time Machine back up I have “the lost space” back more or less. However, the size of the system data category (the et cetera category according to the article) is still rather hefty. I would be interested in hearing the sizes of this category on other machines. It is 320 GB out of 1 TB for me.
That’s not how I would have worded that. It’s more that you cannot control when macOS will remove purgeable content to free up space. But if your amount of free space starts to get tight, macOS will release some or all of the purgeable content.
30GB of the 97GB of data stored on the 494GB HDD in my MBA
That’s about a third also. 
Ok, this looks very much like my numbers. Thanks!
