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MarleTangible | on: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
It's incredible how many applications abuse disk access.

In a similar fashion, Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB of podcasts for random reason and never deleted them. It even showed up as "System Data" and made me look for external drive solutions.

kace91 | parent | next
The system data issue on macOS is awful.

I use my MacBook for a mix of dev work and music production and between docker, music libraries, update caches and the like it’s not weird for me to have to go for a fresh install once every year or two.

Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.

prmph | root | parent | next
Yep, it is an awful situation. I'm increasingly becoming frustrated with how Apple keeps disrespecting users.

I downloaded several MacOS installers, not for the MacBook I use, but intending to use them to create a partitioned USB installer (they were for macOS versions that I could clearly not even use for my current MacBook). Then, after creating the USB, since I was short of space, I deleted the installers, including from the trash.

Weirdly, I did not reclaim any space; I wondered why. After scratching my head for a while, I asked an LLM, which directed me to check the system snapshots. I had previously disabled time machine backup and snapshots, and yet I saw these huge system snapshots containing the files I had deleted, and kicker was, there was no way to delete them!

Again I scratched my head for a while for a solution other than wiping the MacBook and re-installing MacOS, and then I had the idea to just restart. Lo and behold, the snapshots were gone after restarting. I was relieved, but also pretty pissed off at Apple.

ryandrake | root | parent | next
It's just as bas on Windows. Operating Systems and Applications have been using the user's hard drive as a trash dumping ground for decades. Temporary files, logs, caches, caches of caches, settings files, metadata files (desktop.ini, .fseventsd, .Trashes, .Spotlight-V100, .DS_Store). Developers just dump their shit all over your disk as if it belongs to them. I really think apps should have to ask permission before they can write to files, outside of direct user-initiated command.
intrasight | root | parent | next
I can't help but think back to a conversation with my girlfriend in 1984. She had just bought a PC and I had bought a Mac.

She said "Oh, you bought a toy computer. How cute!"

I've owned every architecture of Mac since then, and I still think of it is my toy computer.

jmalicki | root | parent
Disk utility lets you delete them.
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vachina | root | parent | next
Because Apple differentiates their products by their storage sizes, they also sell iCloud subscription. There is zero (in fact negative) incentive to respect your storage space.
threetonesun | root | parent
Been a while since I needed to use it there but it always amazed me that the Windows implementation of iCloud was more flexible in terms of location and ability to decide what files got synced.
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dotxlem | root | parent | next
I had the same problem and had some luck cleaning things up by enabling "calculate all sizes" in Finder, which will show you the total directory size, and makes it a bit easier to look for where the big stuff is hiding. You'll also want to make sure to look through hidden directories like ~/Library; I found a bunch of Docker-related stuff in there which turned out to be where a lot of my disk space went.

You can enable "calculate all sizes" in Finder with Cmd+J. I think it only works in list view however.

robin_reala | root | parent | next
I’d recommend GrandPerspective:[1] it’s really good at displaying this sort of thing, has been around for over two decades, and the developer has managed to keep it to <5MB which is perfect when you’re running very low on space.

[1] https://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

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dewey | root | parent | next
Something like https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu with ("brew install ncdu") is great if you are okay with the command line. It's very annoying to drill down in the Finder especially if it's hidden directories.
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vintagedave | root | parent | next
Also DaisyDisk! Beautiful app. Perfect for discovering this kind of thing.
prmph | root | parent | next
A ton of thanks. This "hack" allowed to finally see some stuff that was eating up a lot of my space and was showing up as "System Data". It turned out the Podman virtual machine on my MacBook had eaten up more 100GB!
1e1a | root | parent
You can also just use du -hs, eg. to show the size of all subdirectories under ~/Library/Caches/ do:

  du -hs ~/Library/Caches/*
zarzavat | root | parent | next
The trick is to reboot into recovery partition, disable SIP, then run OmniDiskSweeper as root (as in `sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper`). Then you can find all kinds of caches that are otherwise hidden by SIP.
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John23832 | root | parent | next
Seconding.

I should not have to hack through /Libary files to regain data on a TB drive because Osx wanted to put 200gbs of crap there in an opaque manner and not give the user ANY direct way to regain their space.

piyh | root | parent | next
Even worse on ipad. My wife is an artist and 100gigs of "system data" is completely inscrutable and there's zero ways to fix it besides a full wipe.
millerm | root | parent | next
I simply run GrandPerspective (GUI app, https://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/), or dust (terminal app, https://github.com/bootandy/dust), to give me an idea of what is going on with disk usage.
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pdntspa | root | parent | next
Equally egregious are applications that insist on using the primary disk to cache model data/sample data/whatever
zbentley | root | parent
What should they do instead?

Like, assuming they need the data and it's inconveniently large to fit into RAM, where/how should they store and access it if not the primary disk?

mock-possum | root | parent
They should ask. Let users specify a scratch / cache location - preferably fast storage that’s not The OS drive
drumttocs8 | root | parent | next
My 256gb Mac Mini currently has 65gb of "System Data" and 40gb of "MacOS"
mbowcut2 | root | parent | next
Gotta hit that docker system prune -a
mschuster91 | root | parent
> Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.

Your friend is called ncdu and can be used as follows:

    sudo ncdu -x -e --exclude Volumes /System/Volumes/Data/
The exclude for Volumes is necessary because otherwise ncdu ends up in an infinite loop - "/Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Volumes/" can be repeated ad nauseam and ncdu's -x flag doesn't catch that for whatever reason.
dewey | parent | next
Don't run "du -h ~/Library/Messages" then, I've mentioned that many times before and it's crazy to me to think that Apple is just using up 100GB on my machine, just because I enable iMessage syncing and don't want to delete old conversations.

One would think that's a extremely common use case and it will only grow the more years iMessage exists. Just offload them to the cloud, charge me for it if you want but every other free message service that exists has no problem doing that.

epistasis | root | parent | next

    sudo du -sh ~/Library/Messages
    Password:
    du: /Users/cvaske/Library/Messages: Operation not permitted
Wow, SIP is a bit more insidious than I remember. Maybe I should try it in Terminal.app rather than a third party app... I wonder if there will ever be a way to tell the OS "this action really was initiated by the user, not malware, let them try to do what they say they want to do"

Edit: investigating a bit more, apparently the lack of a sudo-equivalent, an "elevate this one process temporarily" command is intentional in the design, so that malicious scripts can't take advantage of that "this is really the user" approval path. I can't say I agree with that design decision, but at least it's an ethos.

bee_rider | root | parent | next
Offloading to the cloud and charging the user seems like a bigger breach of expectations than the hard drive space.
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dawnerd | root | parent | next
Same with photos. You can enable the option to offload but there’s no way to control how much is used locally. I don’t know why messages does that either. Also no easy way to remove the hundreds of thousands of photos in messages across all chats.
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bensyverson | root | parent | next
Agreed, it should work like the iCloud Photos library; cache locally, but pull from the cloud when necessary.
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latexr | root | parent
System Settings > General > Storage. Click the ⓘ next to Messages. Sort by size and delete large attachments.
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AndroTux | parent | next
This one drives me nuts. Not just on Mac, also on iPhone/iPad. It's 2026, and 5G is the killer feature advertised everywhere. There's no reason to default to downloading gigabytes of audio files if they could be streamed with no issue whatsoever.
jlokier | root | parent | next
I'm on 5G right now and it just struggled to load the HN front page due to local network congestion. At times of day when it's not congested it reaches 60-90Mbyte/s in the same physical location

Spotify just gave up while trying to show me my podcasts. I can't listen to anything not already downloaded right now.

Yet at 3am I'll be able to download a 100GB LLM without difficulty onto the same device that can't stream a podcast right now.

Unfortunately I don't think 5G is the streaming panacea you have in mind. Maybe one day...

melonpan7 | root | parent | next
Only reason I still download from Apple Music to device is for lossless and hi-res lossless, which would otherwise use a lot of cellular data.
frereubu | root | parent
On 5G, it depends. There are still plenty of people around the world who don't have unlimited data plans.
geooff_ | parent | next
I had the same problem but with a bad time machine backup. ~300GB of my 512GB disk, just labeled the generic "System Data". I lost a day of work over it because I couldn't do Xcode builds and had to do a deep dive into what was going on.
coldtrait | parent | next
This seems to be a recent popular tool to handle this - https://github.com/tw93/Mole

I also prompt warp/gemini cli to identify unnecessary cache and similar data and delete them

jacquesm | parent | next
> Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB

That's one way to drive sales for higher priced SSDs in Apple products. I'm pretty sure that that sort of move shows up as a real blip on Apple's books.

jvidalv | parent | next
Suprisingly Claude is amazing at cleaning up your macbook. Tried, works like a charm.
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chuckadams | parent | next
Someone actually still uses the built-in podcasts app?
hidelooktropic | root | parent | next
Not sure what you have against it. Works great for me. No subscription required. And if I do want to pay for ad free shows and support creators it's easy to do so.

Use whatever you like but I don't think Podcast app users are rare by any stretch of the imagination.

Angostura | root | parent | next
It's absolutely fine, from what I can tell
mister_mort | root | parent | next
AFAIK the native Podcast app for iPhone is the only way to make PC-phone podcast file syncing work. This stops you downloading the same podcast file twice, once on your PC and once on your phone.
dewey | root | parent | next
It probably has more active users than all third party podcast apps on all mobile platforms combined. The power of defaults.
rafram | root | parent
It's generally a good app. People in the tech community like Overcast, but I've always found its UI completely illogical. Apple Podcasts is organized like I'd expect a podcast app to be.
delaminator | parent | next
My WinSxS folder is 17Gb
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