Hard Drive Filling Up After MacOS 26.6 Beta (25G5028f

Question

Created 1w

Replies 2

Boosts 0

Participants 2

After MacOS 26.6 Beta (25G5028f), I see my hard drive constantly filling up in the system data area. It's not local snapshots because I deleted those and they only took up about 20 GB worth of space. This morning, the hard drive was down to only 500MB of space. The odd thing is if I reboot, it goes back to normal and I am back to around 250GB or my 500GB drive. This only started happened in 26.6 Beta, so I am thinking there is an issue with that update?

Answered by Etresoft in 890254022

There is no "system data" area. That's just data that the operating system can't categorize as documents, messages, videos, etc.

You'll have to use some 3rd party storage tool to find out where the storage is being consumed.

I experienced this once myself. It's impressive how fast a modern SSD can allocate 300 GB of storage. In my case it was deep inside some Apple system folder where it was creating a huge number of huge disk image files. I had to disable SIP and hack the permissions of a parent folder so that it couldn't be written to. That fixed it.

I was able to undo the change after a later update. But since then I've even had to roll back to 26.3.1 when Apple News started crashing a few seconds after launch in 26.4. There's no point in putting up with any of the reports I've heard about 26.5 or 26.6 since 27 is only a few hours away.

Answer 1

Etresoft OP

1w

Accepted Answer

There is no "system data" area. That's just data that the operating system can't categorize as documents, messages, videos, etc.

You'll have to use some 3rd party storage tool to find out where the storage is being consumed.

I experienced this once myself. It's impressive how fast a modern SSD can allocate 300 GB of storage. In my case it was deep inside some Apple system folder where it was creating a huge number of huge disk image files. I had to disable SIP and hack the permissions of a parent folder so that it couldn't be written to. That fixed it.

I was able to undo the change after a later update. But since then I've even had to roll back to 26.3.1 when Apple News started crashing a few seconds after launch in 26.4. There's no point in putting up with any of the reports I've heard about 26.5 or 26.6 since 27 is only a few hours away.

Answer 2

kbajura OP

1w

I think I found the culprit. After looking at the space allocation, I found there was some Epson update that was downloading 50 mb every few seconds over and over again. I removed the Epson automatic software updater, and the size seems to have stopped growing. Very odd.