My System drive is almost full...

[Highmac]

MacMini 2018, OS Mojave 10.14.6

Following on from Sooz's thread, I checked my MacMini's drive after being warned it was nearly full. It has a 250GB drive and when I checked storage it told me it contained 8.04GB for Apps; 201.96GB for System; "Other Volumes in Container" 2.84GB, leaving 28GB available. All videos, photos and documents are on external drives.


So what is clogging up the system?




Only other thing I can think of is Mail attachments, but those are generally small things like PDFs and cartoons, photos, etc.

[jchuzi]

Perhaps WhatSize can shed some light on this issue.

[Xairbusdriver]

I like DaisyDisk for looking at where and how big files are.

The ultimate solution, of course, is to offload more stuff. Photos take lots of space, even if they come via email. Obviously, you probably can't do much to reduce the size of the OS. However, if you have any installers that where for older OS's, you might dump those. Additionally, any app that you can restore from the developer may have an installer still laying around; dump. I often make a compressed copy of any app I update. Those .zip files can eventually waste a lot of space. Basically, I/we just don't like to trash stuff! It's just too easy to let stuff accumulate!

Replacing the hard drive can be fairly expensive. And they may be soldered in on a mini. However, I just installed a 1TB SSD in my mini. Took less than 30 minutes. $287 US, including all the crews, tools and cable. Doubles the available space, but the speed increase is amazing. Now I can use up space even faster!!!