MacOS – Remove unwanted ‘system’ files

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Is there any way I can remove some of the 'system' files on my Mac. I understand that normally they shouldn't be touched, but I think most of mine are for old programs that are no longer installed. It's wasting so much space on my computer.

I have 41GB of system files, I'm sure a lot of these must be from old programs that are no longer installed.

Best Answer

I would be extremely hesitant to remove any system files on your Mac, especially since you're not even sure what many of them are. While it is possible to do what you want, I have seen many examples of people doing this and having unintended consequences.

If you're convinced that your system is taking a lot more space than necessary, then the best option to ensure you don't run into problems is to follow these steps:

Make a full Time Machine backup
Do an erase of the drive to cleanly re-install just macOS
Migrate across all the data etc you still want from your Time Machine backup

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MacOS – How to copy files off a failed system partition without encountering permissions problems

The simple solution to this is to reset all the permissions on all copied files to everyone read/write and let the system handle fixing them.

Reset all the permissions on a folder and its contents recursively with:

chmod -R 777 /path/to/folder

Then, run Repair Permissions in Disk Utility, and reset the ACLs on your home folder using the ACL tool on the Recovery HD:

Boot into the Recovery HD using ⌘R.
Run resetpassword in Terminal (available from Utilities → Terminal).
Select your account from the drop-down list.
Click the Reset button for Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs.

MacOS – Free app to detect & delete duplicate files from the Mac

Beware : once you change the content of a torrent, you're not able to seed it anymore.

Open a finder window, search for all files named .dat then just press cmd+a (select all) then cmd+backspace (delete) then cmd+backspace+maj (empty the bin)

You can also use gemini to find duplicates then delete them with Finder, or if you're familiar with bash :

find -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" |
    sort -rn |
    uniq -d |
    xargs -I{} -n1 find -type f -size {}c -print0 |
        xargs -0 md5sum |
        sort |
        uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate

Best Answer

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