MacBook Air storage question

Just a bit outside

Member
SoSH Member
Apr 6, 2011
7,928
Monument, CO
My 14 year old has a 13 inch MacBook Air (early 2015) and is having storage issues. He is running MacOS Sierra. The Mac has 121 gb of storage, but the "system" category is taking up 102 gb. He and I have googled to try and find a solution but we have had no success. I am turning to SOSH for help with any suggestions to help him open up some storage or for a work around to help him have more storage. Thanks in advance.
 

swiftaw

Member
SoSH Member
Jan 31, 2009
3,434
Try downloading OmniDiskSweeper to see what is taking up all the space.

Also, try getting spotlight to reindex your hard drive. Using system preferences>spotlight, add your drive to the list of folders not to index for privacy reasons. Reboot and then remove that entry. Your computer will be slow during the reindex process
 

Gdiguy

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 15, 2005
6,231
San Diego, CA
I use 'disk inventory X' to do the same thing as the Omni program @swiftaw mentions

However, if you need significantly more space, the only real option is either to replace the internal hard drive (a big pain once) or get an external hard drive (little constant pain). I've been running an SSD in an external case ( in , though that's out of stock now... but anything equivalent), and it's not noticeably slower than internal hard drive speed (USB3 is a great thing).
 

nighthob

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 15, 2005
12,678
Yeah, there's a heavy duty 1tb drive that I use as my backup drive that you can take anywhere with ease, just store the non-necessary files there.