[MarleTangible]

It's incredible how many applications abuse disk access.

In a similar fashion, Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB of podcasts for random reason and never deleted them. It even showed up as "System Data" and made me look for external drive solutions.

[torben-friis]

The system data issue on macOS is awful.

I use my MacBook for a mix of dev work and music production and between docker, music libraries, update caches and the like it’s not weird for me to have to go for a fresh install once every year or two.

Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.

[prmph]

Yep, it is an awful situation. I'm increasingly becoming frustrated with how Apple keeps disrespecting users.

I downloaded several MacOS installers, not for the MacBook I use, but intending to use them to create a partitioned USB installer (they were for macOS versions that I could clearly not even use for my current MacBook). Then, after creating the USB, since I was short of space, I deleted the installers, including from the trash.

Weirdly, I did not reclaim any space; I wondered why. After scratching my head for a while, I asked an LLM, which directed me to check the system snapshots. I had previously disabled time machine backup and snapshots, and yet I saw these huge system snapshots containing the files I had deleted, and kicker was, there was no way to delete them!

Again I scratched my head for a while for a solution other than wiping the MacBook and re-installing MacOS, and then I had the idea to just restart. Lo and behold, the snapshots were gone after restarting. I was relieved, but also pretty pissed off at Apple.

[ryandrake]

It's just as bas on Windows. Operating Systems and Applications have been using the user's hard drive as a trash dumping ground for decades. Temporary files, logs, caches, caches of caches, settings files, metadata files (desktop.ini, .fseventsd, .Trashes, .Spotlight-V100, .DS_Store). Developers just dump their shit all over your disk as if it belongs to them. I really think apps should have to ask permission before they can write to files, outside of direct user-initiated command.

[vachina]

But you still have visibility into who uses what.

macOS presents your storage as a black box. You need to bend over backwards to delete things in that black box.

[intrasight]

I can't help but think back to a conversation with my girlfriend in 1984. She had just bought a PC and I had bought a Mac.

She said "Oh, you bought a toy computer. How cute!"

I've owned every architecture of Mac since then, and I still think of it is my toy computer.

[jmalicki]

Disk utility lets you delete them.

[prmph]

Nope, I tried that, was blocked by SIP.

[vachina]

Because Apple differentiates their products by their storage sizes, they also sell iCloud subscription. There is zero (in fact negative) incentive to respect your storage space.

[threetonesun]

Been a while since I needed to use it there but it always amazed me that the Windows implementation of iCloud was more flexible in terms of location and ability to decide what files got synced.

[anonymars]

Ho ho, except for where it puts the photos. Those go into a subfolder of the system photos folder, and there's no configuration (yet you can configure the "shared photos" location)

And then, should you try to set up OneDrive (despite Microsoft's shenanigans, it does simplify taking care of non-tech-savvy relatives), it will refuse to sync the photos folder because 'it contains another cloud storage' and you'll genuinely wonder how or why anyone uses computers anymore

[dotxlem]

I had the same problem and had some luck cleaning things up by enabling "calculate all sizes" in Finder, which will show you the total directory size, and makes it a bit easier to look for where the big stuff is hiding. You'll also want to make sure to look through hidden directories like ~/Library; I found a bunch of Docker-related stuff in there which turned out to be where a lot of my disk space went.

You can enable "calculate all sizes" in Finder with Cmd+J. I think it only works in list view however.

[robin_reala]

I’d recommend GrandPerspective:[1] it’s really good at displaying this sort of thing, has been around for over two decades, and the developer has managed to keep it to <5MB which is perfect when you’re running very low on space.

[1] https://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

[braingravy]

I use GP, would recommend as well; it generates great color codes tree maps of your storage. Once you get used to navigating it that way, you won’t go back.

[dewey]

Something like https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu with ("brew install ncdu") is great if you are okay with the command line. It's very annoying to drill down in the Finder especially if it's hidden directories.

[mrbombastic]

in a similar vein if you are looking for a nice GUI, daisydisk is great: https://daisydiskapp.com one time $10 payment

[prmph]

A ton of thanks. This "hack" allowed to finally see some stuff that was eating up a lot of my space and was showing up as "System Data". It turned out the Podman virtual machine on my MacBook had eaten up more 100GB!

[vintagedave]

Also DaisyDisk! Beautiful app. Perfect for discovering this kind of thing.

[1e1a]

You can also just use du -hs, eg. to show the size of all subdirectories under ~/Library/Caches/ do:

  du -hs ~/Library/Caches/*

[zarzavat]

The trick is to reboot into recovery partition, disable SIP, then run OmniDiskSweeper as root (as in `sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper`). Then you can find all kinds of caches that are otherwise hidden by SIP.

[prmph]

It shouldn't be this hard to clear unwanted data from my own computer

[jasomill]

My immediate reaction to this is that the OS has a hard time establishing intent, and in some cases it probably should be this hard to delete data that's required for the system to boot on the grounds that you'd probably want it if you understood what it was, and ideally also hard for malware to delete data it doesn't want on your computer (forensically useful logs, backup copies of files encrypted by ransomware, etc.).

But none of this applies to caches and temporary files, which could be reasonably managed for 99% of users by adding a "clear all caches" checkbox in the reboot dialog with a warning that doing this is likely to slow down the system and increase battery usage for the next few hours, or to system-managed snapshots that mostly just need better UI and documentation.

UI transparency is my only real complaint. A reasonable amount of data the system wants to make difficult to delete is fine, so long as it clearly explains what it is and why. "System Data" is only acceptable as a description for the root of what should be a well-documented hierarchy.

[nuker]

Hmm, Full Disk Access perm is not enough?

[zarzavat]

Full Disk Access just gives an application the same filesystem powers that your user account has. For most users that means it has administrator level access, which is the 3rd highest tier.

There are two levels above an administrator-level account: 1) the root user can access files that an administrator can't (e.g. the files of other users and certain system configuration files), and 2) the kernel and system processes can access "system" files that even root cannot - this is enforced by SIP.

Apple is quite liberal in what they hide away with SIP. It's possible for disk space to leak whereby the OS has decided to store some file that it doesn't need and there is no way to even list such files without following the above instructions - the only indication will be a mysteriously large amount of space taken up by the system.

It goes without saying that if you're going to delete system files you should make sure you know what you're doing.

[John23832]

Seconding.

I should not have to hack through /Libary files to regain data on a TB drive because Osx wanted to put 200gbs of crap there in an opaque manner and not give the user ANY direct way to regain their space.

[piyh]

Even worse on ipad. My wife is an artist and 100gigs of "system data" is completely inscrutable and there's zero ways to fix it besides a full wipe.

[millerm]

I simply run GrandPerspective (GUI app, https://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/), or dust (terminal app, https://github.com/bootandy/dust), to give me an idea of what is going on with disk usage.

[rickmatt]

Thank you for this! I just downloaded it and identified over 50G of junk. It's just what I have been looking for to help manage my drive utilization.

[millerm]

Great tools!

[pdntspa]

Equally egregious are applications that insist on using the primary disk to cache model data/sample data/whatever

[zbentley]

What should they do instead?

Like, assuming they need the data and it's inconveniently large to fit into RAM, where/how should they store and access it if not the primary disk?

[mock-possum]

They should ask. Let users specify a scratch / cache location - preferably fast storage that’s not The OS drive

[mschuster91]

> Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.

Your friend is called ncdu and can be used as follows:

    sudo ncdu -x -e --exclude Volumes /System/Volumes/Data/

The exclude for Volumes is necessary because otherwise ncdu ends up in an infinite loop - "/Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Volumes/" can be repeated ad nauseam and ncdu's -x flag doesn't catch that for whatever reason.

[drumttocs8]

My 256gb Mac Mini currently has 65gb of "System Data" and 40gb of "MacOS"

[mbowcut2]

Gotta hit that docker system prune -a

[dewey]

Don't run "du -h ~/Library/Messages" then, I've mentioned that many times before and it's crazy to me to think that Apple is just using up 100GB on my machine, just because I enable iMessage syncing and don't want to delete old conversations.

One would think that's a extremely common use case and it will only grow the more years iMessage exists. Just offload them to the cloud, charge me for it if you want but every other free message service that exists has no problem doing that.

[epistasis]

    sudo du -sh ~/Library/Messages
    Password:
    du: /Users/cvaske/Library/Messages: Operation not permitted

Wow, SIP is a bit more insidious than I remember. Maybe I should try it in Terminal.app rather than a third party app... I wonder if there will ever be a way to tell the OS "this action really was initiated by the user, not malware, let them try to do what they say they want to do"

Edit: investigating a bit more, apparently the lack of a sudo-equivalent, an "elevate this one process temporarily" command is intentional in the design, so that malicious scripts can't take advantage of that "this is really the user" approval path. I can't say I agree with that design decision, but at least it's an ethos.

[bee_rider]

Offloading to the cloud and charging the user seems like a bigger breach of expectations than the hard drive space.

[dewey]

If you have a choice there's nothing wrong with it. It's the same way that iCloud Photos already work. You can either disable iCloud and have everything locally in your Photos app or let it dynamically offload to iCloud (If you have enough cloud space).

I'd rather pay for cloud space that I'm already using anyway than having it take up my limited space on my laptop that I can't extend.

[dawnerd]

Same with photos. You can enable the option to offload but there’s no way to control how much is used locally. I don’t know why messages does that either. Also no easy way to remove the hundreds of thousands of photos in messages across all chats.

[mh-]

And for people like me who are content to pay for the iCloud storage in order to not delete them - there's no way to say "keep everything. but not locally, because that's silly."

[bensyverson]

Agreed, it should work like the iCloud Photos library; cache locally, but pull from the cloud when necessary.

[mh-]

Even with the way Photos work - which is desirable, I agree - I should be able to specify a limit on how much local disk it uses.

I don't know what the formula it uses is, but it's insufficient.

[bensyverson]

There is a workaround… You can create an APFS partition on your main drive, set it to a fixed size (e.g. 10GB), and then move the location of your Photos library to that drive.

Note that if your Photos library is already larger than you want it to be, you may need to make sure it's synced, delete it, and create a new library on the drive. It will then sync with iCloud. But that's a hassle, and I would back up the library before you do this.

[latexr]

System Settings > General > Storage. Click the ⓘ next to Messages. Sort by size and delete large attachments.

[dewey]

Appreciate the suggestion but that's similar to fixes like "Have you tried re-installing your OS, maybe that fixes the issue?".

I don't want to babysit my attachments or delete old conversations just because Apple doesn't put effort into that app. Probably my fault for still using it, but Telegram, WhatApp and Signal all manage to do it better.

[AndroTux]

This one drives me nuts. Not just on Mac, also on iPhone/iPad. It's 2026, and 5G is the killer feature advertised everywhere. There's no reason to default to downloading gigabytes of audio files if they could be streamed with no issue whatsoever.

[jlokier]

I'm on 5G right now and it just struggled to load the HN front page due to local network congestion. At times of day when it's not congested it reaches 60-90Mbyte/s in the same physical location

Spotify just gave up while trying to show me my podcasts. I can't listen to anything not already downloaded right now.

Yet at 3am I'll be able to download a 100GB LLM without difficulty onto the same device that can't stream a podcast right now.

Unfortunately I don't think 5G is the streaming panacea you have in mind. Maybe one day...

[voakbasda]

Shared medium will always have congestion. It will never get better. Technology can get faster, but congestion is forever.

[melonpan7]

Only reason I still download from Apple Music to device is for lossless and hi-res lossless, which would otherwise use a lot of cellular data.

[frereubu]

On 5G, it depends. There are still plenty of people around the world who don't have unlimited data plans.

[AndroTux]

Then they can enable downloads in the settings. I’m not saying they should remove the feature. I’m saying setting this as a default on a non-budget device is a bad design choice.

[coldtrait]

This seems to be a recent popular tool to handle this - https://github.com/tw93/Mole

I also prompt warp/gemini cli to identify unnecessary cache and similar data and delete them

[geooff_]

I had the same problem but with a bad time machine backup. ~300GB of my 512GB disk, just labeled the generic "System Data". I lost a day of work over it because I couldn't do Xcode builds and had to do a deep dive into what was going on.

[jacquesm]

> Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB

That's one way to drive sales for higher priced SSDs in Apple products. I'm pretty sure that that sort of move shows up as a real blip on Apple's books.

[jvidalv]

Suprisingly Claude is amazing at cleaning up your macbook. Tried, works like a charm.

[chuckadams]

Someone actually still uses the built-in podcasts app?

[hidelooktropic]

Not sure what you have against it. Works great for me. No subscription required. And if I do want to pay for ad free shows and support creators it's easy to do so.

Use whatever you like but I don't think Podcast app users are rare by any stretch of the imagination.

[Angostura]

It's absolutely fine, from what I can tell

[mister_mort]

AFAIK the native Podcast app for iPhone is the only way to make PC-phone podcast file syncing work. This stops you downloading the same podcast file twice, once on your PC and once on your phone.

[dewey]

It probably has more active users than all third party podcast apps on all mobile platforms combined. The power of defaults.

[rafram]

It's generally a good app. People in the tech community like Overcast, but I've always found its UI completely illogical. Apple Podcasts is organized like I'd expect a podcast app to be.

[delaminator]

My WinSxS folder is 17Gb