But don’t worry, these files will be gone if you come back tomorrow. If you’ve been moving a lot of files around, this category may quickly inflate. Tip: Local snaphots are temporary Time Machine backups that are stored on your Mac for 24 hours. Your operating system should automatically maintain and clear this category, but this doesn't always happen, resulting in a loss of precious disk space, and often the reason why 'System' takes up so much storage. It's a bit of a category dumping ground as well as being home to your system and macOS folders it holds all kind of things like:Īpp cache (3-4 GB, can be quickly deleted with an app) The 'System' in Mac storage is a bit of a gray area (literally). So what's going on here? What is 'System' in Mac storage Why does 'System' take up so much Mac storage?Īs you can see, 'System' is taking up 11.24GB of space on my drive. This is good news, but you’ll have to delete some unimportant files. If your “System” data shows something around 14-20 GB, you have pretty good chances to slim it down to that original size. The default size of the macOS system is 12 GB. My system occupies 11.24 GB on disk, and what have you got? You might be alarmed to discover 'System' is occupying a lot of disk space. Here you get a nice little visual of your storage situation. The categories’ size may drastically change.

Tip: Give your Mac about a minute to calculate the real System size. Select Apple Menu > About This Mac > Storage. Just in case you need a quick reminder, here's how you can check your storage. Let's dive straight in and uncover the system storage mysteries. For any Mac owner who is running low on space, the first thing we do is check our storage availability.īut have you ever wondered why is 'System' using so much disk space? And what exactly is meant by 'System' so can reclaim the space?

Mac hard drive space analyzer