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When you click on snapshots… it will then list all known snapshots on that volume, but the App Store version can’t delete any directly, instead providing you with the command to use in Terminal.īy now, you should have a reasonable idea as to where your free space went, and ample opportunities to reclaim at least some of it. This can list ‘hidden space’ on a volume. Which should get macOS to start removing them.Īnother utility which you might find helpful is DaisyDisk.
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Tmutil thinlocalsnapshots /Volumes/ThunderBay1 10000000000000000 1 Lists all snapshots on your boot volumes, or use the volume path instead of / for a different volume. If you really won’t buy CCC, you can do similar things in Terminal’s command line. You can then clean up older and larger snapshots as you wish, and much of that purgeable space should be freed fully. After a few seconds, you should see a list of all snapshots on that volume and their sizes. To see space occupied by snapshots, select the disk and temporarily enable CCC Snapshots. The best tool for looking at these is Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), which provides a friendly graphical interface to snapshots.
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Your first suspicion should be old snapshots. Now’s the time to see what’s using up the space within that volume. The standard layout for an internal boot volume should appear something likeĢ: Apple_APFS Container disk5 1.0 TB disk4s2ġ: APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data 563.9 GB disk5s1ĥ: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 11.1 GB disk5s5īy now you should be happy that any missing free space isn’t because of partitioning, or being stolen by a hidden volume within the same container. For this, the best measure isĭepending on which disk you want to look at. Recall that, while APFS volumes share the same space within a container, containers don’t share space but occupy a fixed size.ĭisk Utility isn’t so good at revealing hidden volumes which could be stealing space within a container.
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This is also a good time to look at APFS containers and disk partitioning. The next stop is a quick check in Disk Utility, for its estimate of what’s used and free, which tends to be more reliable than the Finder. When space is running short, macOS is supposed to start purging what’s reported as being purgeable, including old snapshots, but that doesn’t always happen when you’d expect it. But sometimes the figures given in the Finder don’t come close to those in Disk Utility or at the command line. When it’s working correctly, the amount given as purgeable represents space which is currently used by snapshots and other dispensible data. Most of the time, the Finder’s Get Info dialog returns reasonably reliable figures for used and free space on APFS volumes. This article explains what you can do when faced with that and similar problems. As a result, it may appear that an APFS volume or disk is full, and installers and apps may refuse to work despite there apparently being ample free space. This normally means that there are small discrepancies between different estimates of free and used space, but sometimes those seem huge. This is because there’s more to it than just the file system’s directories and file data. APFS is a more complex and dynamic file system than HFS+, in that there often isn’t a simple answer to how much free space there is on any given disk or volume.