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I recently had a similar problem where system files were filling my entire drive and even grew larger when I deleted files.
The only thing fixing the problem was deleting a faulty local APFS snapshot using disk utility. You can do so by showing APFS snapshots via the menu bar and then checking your system drive. I also had to reboot a couple of times before I could actually delete it.
I Hope this helps!
@franzbroetchen You're my new hero, I've search everywhere and never found that tip. I had 230Gb worth of broken APFS snapshots, that are now gone!
You're welcome! Maybe this is be a bug in the recent versions of macOS? I almost didn't find this tip when I looked for solutions and the Apple support forums don't mention this fix at all
There’s a response from someone at Apple Community support that explains what might be happening.
FWIW, "System Data" is not just space used with macOS system applications but it is also contains user data that does not neatly fit into one of the other categories. Often a lot of this but not all can be found in the hidden user's Library folder (accessed by holding down the Option key and selecting the "Go" menu in Finder.
If you open this folder look at the size of the "Application Support" folder. Depending on your apps, they could be storing a lot of data in these folders. Before messing with anything in these folders, you need to go to the application developer site and see what can be done with them. Some apps can allow certain portions of that data to be located on an external drive.
As for the amount you are seeing, 50-60 GB is not unusual for "System Data".
Here’s the link. There’s not much more there but I like to share where I got the quote from.
Good luck!
Deleting local timemachine backup helps. In the terminal tmutil -thinlocalsnaphots or something similar is the command.
Also use the Finder
Then investigate and delete.
@Samskara I tried deleting it from the CLI, first but it failed. I don't remember the exact message anymore.
Then I tried deleting the same image using @franzbroetchen 's method and it worked, even if was the same snapshot.
Great that you found the solution. :)