I upgraded from Yosemite on the advice of Apple Care. --cough-- Not smart. The machine is soooooo sluggish now. Bigger hungrier OS. I get that.
But I did something to try to figure out why I’m not opening up HD space even though I’m removing about 85 Gigs of photos to external Hard Drives. I right clicked on the HD icon and chose " Manage Storage ".
That diagnostic informs me that my System takes up 311.94 GIGS out of a 500 Gig HD.
I find this to be impossible. How can any Operating System take up 311 Gigabytes?? What is going on on my Hard Drive that’s hidden? Viruses? Malware?? Something? It’s beyond my belief that even Sierra can be more than 300 Gigs big.
Thoughts? I do run Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac in the background and my machine seems to be clean, according to that software.
When I upgraded to Sierra, I actually found more room on my hard drive than with the previous OS. I have a before/after screenshot somewhere on my laptop, but it freed up disk space. My desktop that I’m on is showing 67.83 Gigs under “System” right now, so I don’t know why yours is showing so much. I’ll check the other Macs and see what they’re at.
I’m running it now and will learn to interpret it. While the graphics seem very pretty, I’m not sure it will be as useful as a simple diagnostic that tells me the largest files running to the smallest files running at a given time and what is using the most RAM.
Yanno…my Samsung Galaxy Note 4, a phone at LEAST 2 years old, is wired to deliver this data.
Run Manage Storage again, let it run for at least 1 minute or at least until all the spinners have stopped spinning, then tell us if it still counts System as 300 gigs.
If you can’t open the link, google “sierra system storage huge” to find several threads on the topic. Several issues are identified. One is that the “About This Mac” storage analysis that you are looking at is idiosyncratic, and may add iTunes to the “System” category. If that’s the case, there is no real problem, and other storage analysis tools such as those other posters have recommended should show you what’s going on. Some other real problems are identified, including a bug in some Adobe app.
I do understand the difference and have since 1981.
I downloaded the software and ran it. It’s very educational and it may yet guide me to being able to remove some material that will free up some space on my hard drive thank you for suggesting it.
Considerably less fond of the modern iterations of MacOS, unfortunately.
I keep threatening to nuke the HD and restore from my last extant backup of 10.6.8 and run 10.12 in a freaking virtual machine for stuff that 10.6.8 is too old for. I was doing that before and it was better. More responsive. Fewer annoyances like the new & shiny green window widget behavior (I want ZOOM not freaking maximize! If I wanted a Windows box I would’ve bought one!) and the lack of scrollbar arrows. But yeah, mostly the sludginess.
Exactly the right word. Sludginess.
I’ve got a mid-2011 Mac Mini. Unit I upgraded to Sierra, I NEVER saw the colored spinning wheel of eternal damnation.
Now? I cannot get from Point A to Point B without enduring it. This machine is maxed at 8 Gigs of RAM. So speeding it up that way isn’t an option.
I’m pissed. Already found a 2012 Mini that can take 16 Gigs of RAM, but fuck… I don’t NEED Sierra. I miss Yosemite.
Mine has 16 GB of RAM and an 8-core 2.3 GHz processor. It’s roughly as old as your Mini. Based on my experience, upgrading your box to one with 16 BM of ram won’t help.
I also upgraded the internal HD to a 2 TB SSD drive, on the advice of a 3rd party developer who says MacOS 10.11 and others of roughly modern vintage were allowed/encouraged to do a much busier sequence of reads and writes from HD because the Apple developers optimized for SSD drives. That didn’t help much easier (although I will say it boots much much faster on the rare occasion that I reboot it).
My 1998-vintage “WallStreet” PowerBook feels faster. Of course it is limited on the web to what a 2006-vintage / Panther-compatible browser knows how to do, and it won’t run FileMaker 8.5 let alone 16, and it would choke on a movie taken from an iPhone even if I could acquire the codecs for such an elderly machine, but it feels nimble and efficient.
Maybe this machine has reached that vintage where I need to window-shop for an accelerator.
good to know!