How to you purge un-needed system data
Viscomie
User level: Level 1 (4 points)
User level: Level 1 (4 points)How to purge unneeded system data
Posted on Oct 5, 2026 9:35 AM
2 replies
OldToad
User level: Level 4 (1,299 points)
User level: Level 4 (1,299 points)Oct 5, 2026 12:30 PM in response to Viscomie
Do you use Time Machine for backups? If you do you can recover some space on your boot drive with Disk Utility. Open DU and select your data drive. Check the bottom window to see if there are any local snapshots. If so delete all but the last one.
On one external drive I removed 115 local snapshots and recovered 35 GB of space.
Another think you can do is shut down each night. That clean out the temporary system and appliction cache and swap files. Booting into boot into Safe Mode (How to use safe mode on your Mac) will help with the additional System data.
John Galt
User level: Level 10 (162,806 points)
User level: Level 10 (162,806 points)Oct 5, 2026 10:11 AM in response to Viscomie
How to free up ‘System Data’ and other storage on your Mac - Apple Community explains what "system data" is and the reasons you may want to avoid characterizing it as "un-needed" without justification.
Originally posted at discussions.apple.com/thread/256370893