So, your Mac is running out of storage. You try to figure out what’s taking up your disk space by clicking the Apple logo on the top-left of the screen, selecting About This Mac, and hitting the Storage tab.

• My Entire Mac Storage Is Apps Free
• My Entire Mac Storage Is Apps Windows 10

To your surprise, you see a yellow bar representing “System” that seems to occupy way more space than you think it should. In the example above, it only shows 207 GB, but take a look at this Apple discussion — some Mac users report that System Storage takes an astonishing 250 GB.

May 22, 2019  4. Delete iTunes Files and iOS Backups. If you back up your iPhone or iPad to your Mac, the backups could take up gigabytes of storage space. In the Storage Management window, click on the iOS Files section. Once you’re sure you want to delete your iOS device backup, click on it and press the Delete button. In a similar fashion, you can delete data from the iTunes app from the iTunes section. Nov 09, 2018  Part 1. What is System Storage on Mac? Before we go to the solution, it is better to know well about the system storage on Mac. In About this Mac Storage, we can see Mac storage are categoried into different groups: Photos, Apps, iOS Files, Audio, System, etc. And the System storage is confusing, makes it harder to know what is in the System. What is system in the mac storage. Click to rate this post! Total: 0 Average: 0 storage. Previous post. Apple Watch keeps loading with erase all contacts or cxl. MBP16 WIFI issues with Airpods Pro. Related posts. How can I verify my Firevault recovery code? Feb 09, 2020  If you read my previous post about how to format an external drive for Mac, you know that I bought a 2TB Seagate Expansion external hard drive and managed to create two partitions on the disk — one for Mac backup purposes, and the other for personal use. In this article, I’m going to show you how to back up your Mac data to an external drive.You should back up your Mac on a regular basis.

Worse yet, you have no idea what’s included in “System” storage, because clicking the “Manage” button brings you to this System Information window… and the “System” row is greyed out.

Why does my Mac system require so much space?

What does it contain?

Is it safe to remove some of those system files?

How do I regain more storage space?

Questions like these may easily get to your head. Although my Mac now has a good amount of disk space available, I’m always wary of files that are taking up more space than they should.

I have no idea why “System” is greyed out while “Documents,” “System Junk,” “Trash,” etc. allow you to review the files based on size and type. My hunch is that Apple does this on purpose to prevent users from deleting system files that could lead to serious issues.

What Files Are Included in System Storage on Mac?

During my research, I found many people report that Apple counts iTunes backup files and app caches (e.g. Adobe video cache files) in the System category.

Since it’s greyed out and we are unable to click on that category for deeper analysis, we’ll have to use a third-party app to assist.

CleanMyMac X is perfect for this kind of analysis. Since I tested the app in our best Mac cleaner review, it immediately came to my head when I saw “System” was greyed out in Storage. Note that CleanMyMac isn’t freeware, but the new “Space Lens” feature is free to use and it allows you to scan your Macintosh HD, and then show you an in-depth overview of what’s taking up disk space on your Mac.

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May 25, 2015  The simplest approach to see what apps are on a Mac is to visit the /Applications folder, this will show all apps that users have installed through the App Store, that came bundled with the Mac, and that have been installed through most package managers, and by user drag & drop. Application_name app location mac download. When you run an application in Mac OS X you’ll notice that the name of the application is displayed on the top left of the toolbar in Mac os X: A a great geek prank to play on someone if anything, you can change the name that is displayed in the toolbar when running an application. It is doing this due to the name of the folder, ending in.app. Applications on Mac OS (and iOS for that matter) are actually 'app bundles', containing various resources and executables in a folder ending with.app. The reason this is grayed out is because the Save/Open box would automatically filter those out. Scroll to the bottom of the list of apps to reveal System Services, then click the Details button to see specific system services that use your location. Location-Based Suggestions allows the location of your Mac to be used by Safari Suggestions or Spotlight Suggestions. Jun 10, 2020  You might have started noticing a location icon in the menubar while using apps and services on your Mac. Your location is shared among those apps which might be a.

Step 1:Download CleanMyMac and install the app on your Mac. Open it, under “Space Lens” module, first click the yellow “Grant Access” button to allow the app to access your Mac files and then select “Scan” to get started.

Step 2: Soon it’ll show you a folder/file tree and you can hover your cursor over each block (i.e. a folder). There you can find more details. In this case, I clicked “System” folder to continue.

Step 3: The file breakdown below indicates that some Library and iOS Support files are the culprits.

The interesting part is that the System file size shown in CleanMyMac is much smaller than the size shown in System Information. This puzzles me and makes me believe that Apple definitely has counted some other files (not real system files) in the System category.

What are they? I have no clue, honestly. But as reported by other Mac users who experienced the same issue, they said Apple also considers app caches and iTunes backup files as System files.

Out of curiosity, I ran CleanMyMac again for a quick scan. That app found 13.92 GB in iTunes Junk. Further review revealed that the junk files are old iOS device backups, software updates, broken downloads, etc.

But even after adding this amount to the original system files returned by CleanMyMac X, the total size is still a bit less than what’s returned in System Information.

If cleaning the System Storage is still not enough to bring your Mac available disk space to a normal level (i.e. 20% or more), see below.

What Else Can I Do to Reclaim More Disk Space?

There are tons of ways out there. Here are a few of my favorites that should help you get back a decent amount of space quickly.

1. Sort all files by size and delete old large files.

Open Finder, go to Recents and look at the Size column. Click on it to sort all recent files by file size (from large to small). You’ll have a clear overview of what items are eating up a large amount of space, e.g. From 1 GB to 10 GB, and from 100 MB to 1 GB.

My Entire Mac Storage Is Apps Free

On my MacBook Pro, I found a few large videos that could be transferred to an external drive.

Note: If the Size column doesn’t show up, click on the Settings icon and select Arrange By > Size.

My Entire Mac Storage Is Apps Windows 10

2. Remove duplicate files.

Don’t forget those duplicates and similar files! They can stack up without you being aware of it. Finding them is sometimes time-consuming. That’s what Gemini 2 is designed for. Simply select a few frequently used folders (e.g. Documents, Downloads, etc.) in the main zone of Gemini.

It then scans them and returns all the duplicate files that might be worth removing. Of course, it’s always a good practice to review them before doing so. You can also read more from our detailed Gemini review here.

Wrapping It Up

Ever since Apple introduced the Optimized Storage feature, Mac users got the option of saving space by storing content in the cloud. Apple also has several new tools that make it easy to find and remove unneeded files.

That bar under the Storage tab is beautiful. It does allow you to get a quick overview of what’s taking up the most space on our hard drive. However, it still lacks insights into the “System” category as it’s greyed out.

Hopefully, the guides above have helped you figure out the reasons you’ve got so much “System” data, and most importantly you’ve reclaimed some disk space — especially for new MacBooks pre-installed with flash storage — every gigabyte is precious!