A somewhat hidden panel in iOS’s Settings app will tell you everything you need to know. To see what’s taking up all your storage space, open the Settings app, tap General, then tap Usage. May 07, 2020 Step 1: Click each hard drive partition, check what is taking space on your disk. Let's take C drive for example: Click C drive and figure out what’s taking up space. Step 2: Clear apps, programs, files, etc that are taking up space on hard drive. Click each category and remove useless apps, files, etc. Nov 09, 2018 The updates of the iOS system can also be completed through iTunes, and the updated files as well as iTunes backup could make system storage huge. The iPhone backups and iOS updates files can deplete the storage up to 10+GB on Mac without knowing it. So removing iTunes files is a great to clean up system storage on Mac.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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!
If you are running out of space on your iPhone or iPad and have decided to see what apps are taking up the most space, you probably have noticed that WhatsApp consistently is close to the very top.
WhatsApp is popular and anyone I know who uses it, usually has at least 10 to 15 group chats they are part of. With all those chats, they have tons of shared videos and pictures, which add up to a lot of space. Even if you disable the option of saving media to your camera roll, WhatsApp still can take up several GBs easily.
In this article, I’ll show you how you can reduce the amount of storage space WhatsApp is using and also keep a history of your chats for future reference.
Find the Biggest Chats in WhatsApp
First, you should try to figure out which chats are taking up the most space in WhatsApp. When you look at the Storage & iCloud Usage screen, it only shows you the total amount of space being taken up by WhatsApp, which isn’t really all that useful.
So we know the app is taking up almost 3 GB of space, but which chats inside WhatsApp are the space hoggers? To figure that out, open WhatsApp, tap on Settings at the bottom right and then tap on Data and Storage Usage.
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Next, tap on Storage Usage at the bottom.
Whats Taking Up Space Mac App Download
Finally, you will get a listing of which chats (group or individual) are taking up the most space on your phone.
As you can see, my Family group chat is eating up almost half a gigabyte of data. So is the next group chat right below that. Now that we know which chats are using up the most space, we can start to clear them out.
Export and Clear Chats
The best way to reduce the size of your WhatsApp chats and still keep the chat history is to export and then clear. In WhatsApp, there are a couple of options you have: clear a chat, delete a chat, or archive a chat.
Clearing a chat will clear all the current chat history from that chat, but keep the blank chat still visible in the Chats tab of the app. Here’s an example of two cleared chats at the top of my Chats dialog.
Note that when you clear a chat, it will remove all the previous chat history, so you need to export the chat before you clear it if you care to keep a history of the chat. Once you clear a chat, it will also disappear from the chat backup to iCloud. Any new messages into those chats will begin to be saved on the phone and into iCloud like normal.
You can clear or export a chat by swiping from right to left on the chat and then tapping on the More icon.
This will bring up a set of options at the bottom of the screen. Here you can choose Export Chat to first save the chat history out to a third-party program like Notes, Google Drive, OneNote, OneDrive, etc. It depends on what apps you have installed on your phone. If nothing, you can save it out to iCloud Drive.
Clearing chats will save you the most space in the quickest possible manner. If you have a large group chat, I suggest clearing it out every couple of months, which will save you a lot of space overall.
Note that archiving a chat simply hides it from view in the Chats tab. If you archive all of your chats, it will not reduce the amount of space WhatsApp is using because the chats are simply hidden, not deleted.
Whats Taking Up Space Mac Application
If you delete a chat instead of clearing the chat, it will remove all the message history, but in addition, it will remove the chat from your Chats tab. For a group, if you exit the group, it doesn’t automatically delete the group or chat history. After exiting a group, you have to swipe again, go to More and then tap on Delete Group.
Adjust Chat Settings
You can do all of this individually per chat on the chats tab or you can tap on Settings and then Chats to perform the actions on all chats.
You can archive all chats, clear all chats or delete all chats. I don’t really recommend doing this unless you really don’t care about saving any kind of chat history. Clearing all chats is still a better option than deleting because you’ll still be able to see the chats on the Chats tab.
You should also go ahead and toggle off the Save to Camera Roll option as that can add up to a lot of space, especially if you are in one of those groups where people share pics and videos all the time. You don’t want all that clogging up your iCloud photo library.
Lastly, if you tap on Chat Backup, you can see exactly how much space is being used in iCloud for WhatsApp chat history. In my case, before I cleared out the big chats, my total size was over 1 GB, but now it’s only around 64 MB.
What Apps Are Taking Up Space On Mac
So hopefully that helps you clear out some space on your iPhone that you might have thought couldn’t be removed. With the option to export chats too, there’s no reason WhatsApp should be taking up more than a few hundred MBs on your phone. Enjoy!
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