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Every few months I have moved data out of my mac computer onto a hard drive because of this problem. I now again have this alert in the Terminal: Your disk space is critically low. Older terminal scrollback contents may be automatically discarded to conserve VM backing store.:

alert of low disk space

And this one on the desktop: Your disk is almost full. Save space by optimising storage:

alert of full disk

I click on Manage and see that system storage is taking 80 GB on a 128 GB SSD drive:

System information on storage

I cleared more files yesterday and had 6 GB of storage free. A few hours later, free space went down to 3 GB, all taken by system storage. I will soon have nothing left on the computer but system storage, and then have to reinstall it and go back to the more normal 10 GB.

I have run this command to find files larger than 1 GB; it shows only the Spotlight file with 4 GB.

$ sudo find /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/ -size +1G  2>/dev/null
Password:
/Volumes/Macintosh HD//.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/CA9AE856-FB94-4765-9028-38E04BEC9683/0.indexArrays

What Terminal commands could I run to identify the source of this runaway system storage and to clear it?

Note: Similar to the unanswered System storage keeps on increasing , except that I provided more textual details on the alert and that I am looking first to identify the issue with a Terminal command.

miguelmorin
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    Try the cleaning app Onyx to delete caches and run macOS built-in cleaning scripts. Then try a utility like OmniDiskSweeper (free) to find the biggest culprits. – Steve Chambers Sep 11 '20 at 00:30
  • Any storage related question should be closed as duplicate of

    https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/5353/how-can-i-figure-out-whats-slowly-eating-my-hd-space/5360#5360

    But in response to your note:

    "except that I provided more textual details on the alert"

    Thank you for asking a question with all the information!

    "looking first to identify the issue with a Terminal command."

    If someone has a way to find such info via command line, like using du or wc or stat, that also belongs to the question above.

     – anki Sep 11 '20 at 05:49
  • Find where the files are, it will be easier to guess what created them. Also, the method of finding files above 1 GB size is not helpful since they can be several 20 MB cookies files too. Firefox does that for example. – anki Sep 11 '20 at 05:53
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    10 GB free space is nowhere near enough. You will keep hitting this issue all the time [as you have discovered] On any drive you must keep 10% free space - ironically, more on a tiny drive. You ought to consider 30GB free on a 128 for a trouble-free life. – Tetsujin Sep 11 '20 at 07:47
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    Thanks to all! I tried the common issues on that thread with no result. I used OmniDiskSweeper and found the culprit in GarageBand, and also cleaned up Homebrew. I now have 38 GB free. I added my answer in the suggested thread. – miguelmorin Sep 11 '20 at 09:59

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