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One of my hosts runs on Mac OS Catalina, and it constantly runs out of disk space...
I have scheduled tasks running there and every day it uploads files into /Users/labuser/myfolder and removes older files from that folder.
After digging through folders I found that /System/Volumes/Data/Users/labuser/myfolder takes 90% of occupied space on my host.
Is there a way to disable this feature on Catalina and stop it from growing /System/Volumes/Data/... ?
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If you encounter the macOS Catalina problem where the installation fails due to low disk space, simply restart your Mac and press Control + R while it's booting to enter the Recovery mode. Select 'Disk boot' to boot normally, then remove unnecessary files to make space.
macOS includes enhanced protection for your Mac with cryptographic technology (macOS 11 or later) that prevents access to or execution of files that don't have a valid cryptographic signature from Apple. All system files are protected on the signed system volume (SSV).
The warning message indicating that your startup disk is almost full appears when there is no longer enough free space on your disk. This is often due to having too many files occupying your Mac's hard drive, bringing free space to a dangerously low level. To resolve this issue, you need to free up some disk space.
If System Data is taking up too much disk space on your Mac, explore those two folders and see what's stored in them. If you're having a lot of your space allocated for System Data, you may have Time Machine snapshots stored on your Mac.
Much of the storage space used by the OS for system-related tasks is cleared when macOS deletes the files automatically, but sometimes that doesn’t happen, which is why the System Data category can grow very large. Apple doesn’t explain what comprises this category of storage, but it’s likely that the following are part of it:
The default size of macOS Big Sur system is 12 GB. If your “System” data shows something around 14-20 GB, you have pretty good chances to slim it down to that original size. This is good news, but you’ll have to delete some unimportant files. Why does "System" take up so much Mac storage?
macOS System Data is mainly stored in both the System and Library folders. If System Data is taking up too much disk space on your Mac, explore those two folders and see what's stored in them.
/Users/labuser/myfolder is equivalent to the folder with /System/Volumes/Data/ prepended. macOS 10.15 Catalina added firmlinks (some more description here), but actually from a practical perspective (to the user) these are one and the same.
Thus, your problem has nothing to do with a "feature" on Catalina; rather it has to do with the amount of data you're storing and backing up from /Users/labuser/myfolder.
Whether you use ncdu or another disk usage manager that will solve you problem of finding out why you're consuming all of your disk space.
One other relevant point is that because these are "symlinked" (called firmlinks by Apple), some disk inventory apps don't know how to handle this and end up in a recursion scenario when trying to understand total disk usage. I've seen this behavior with ncdu also. That being said, if you run the disk inventory on a subfolder of /System/Volumes/Data/, e.g.:
cd /Users
ncdu
It should avoid these issues.
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