System storage taking up WAY too much space on Macbook
You can use ncdu to analyze your disk usage. From its homepage:
Ncdu is a disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface. It is designed to find space hogs on a remote server where you don't have an entire graphical setup available, but it is a useful tool even on regular desktop systems. Ncdu aims to be fast, simple and easy to use, and should be able to run in any minimal POSIX-like environment with ncurses installed.
It is available on homebrew (brew install ncdu).
Try
ncdu $HOME
or
ncdu /
You can install and see what is taking up your drive with:
- Disk Inventory X
- Grandperspective
Of course you can do it manually:
- open Terminal
- enter
sudo su -and type your password when asked -
cd /- start on root folder -
du -d1 | sort -g- shows the biggest folder last - cd to the last listed directory (or one of the last to see what's in there)
- repeat from
du -d1 | sort -gand go as deep as you need
You can install OmniDiskSweeper to browse and put to trash enormous files. I had a similar problem and it turned out to be old dev-related frameworks and simulators I didn't use anymore taking up to 50Gb, all placed under the "System" category in the Storage Manager. I guess you can achieve the same results without the soft I linked above, but it helped me locate and delete these files in a couple of minutes, so it's the best solution I found so far for an issue like this !