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I checked the storage on my macbook and discovered the 'system' was using nearly 150 GB.

I looked around online and discovered the app OmniDiskSweeper. I gave it a go and discovered a massive file that appears to be related to google chrome, located in /private/var/folders/j9/T/com.google.Chrome/zip_cache-9F00A5C9-014F-4D48-AC13-2F74C26F4Fc7-31472-000034BBAF5DAD8A

Does anyone have any idea what this could be, and how it could be so large? can I delete it?

When i try manually searching for any of those files in finder, it turns up blank. omnidisksweep is the only way I can see it (that I know of anyways) and thus the only way to delete it as well. I really want to destroy this file but afraid to destroy some crucial thing on my computer.

Any advice greatly appreciated!

image of file

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    If it is in any folder called cache it is deletable. I would move it to the desktop, restart the mac and see how Chrome behaves, if it is fine, delete it. Otherwise put it back.
    – Steve Chambers
    Commented Mar 4, 2019 at 23:12

2 Answers 2

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It's a cache file with a name associating it to the browser Google Chrome.

Anything under the path /private/var/folders/* can be deleted and will be repopulated/rebuilt after the next boot.

That is: do not delete /private/var/folders/ itself!

But below that, you may trash anything and then reboot.

Note that a few files will be in use or protected, so you could only delete them via the Trash after a reboot.

In this case: make sure Chrome is closed, then trash only the big file you found and delete the file. Leave the rest as is.

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  • To avoid problems with the running software it's better to remove the content of /private/var/folders from the Recovery system. In this way the OS is not running and it's safer to delete such folders.
    – Bemipefe
    Commented Feb 17, 2022 at 8:56
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I just ran into this same issue, except my file was ~100gb and the only reason I noticed was my laptop started complaining about running out of disk space. I am puzzled what the file was since Chrome's own "Clear Browsing Data..." tool didn't show this, and I believe a user should be made aware if an app is going to fill up their disk!

In any case, my answer is simple: I decided to try restarting first, and that seemed to be sufficient, the file was gone afterwards.

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