I'm getting messages that I'm running out of disk space. "About this mac" > Storage shows this:
Note that it says I have 172 GB available, over a third of the disk.
Assuming the messages about running out of disk space were correct I did a df and indeed that shows that I only have 15 GB available:
$ df -kh /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1 466Gi 446Gi 15Gi 97% 1532132 9223372036853243675 0% /
That's a huge difference. My trash is not the problem nor are local snapshots. Following https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/324443/233542, I deleted local snapshots and that only freed another 15 GB of data:
$ tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 9999999999 1
$ df -kh /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1 466Gi 431Gi 30Gi 94% 1532163 9223372036853243644 0% /
du doesn't help me either:
$ sudo du -hs * 2>/dev/null
Password:
16G Applications
17G Library
0B Network
16G System
4.0K TMVersion.ini
243G Users
487M Volumes
2.5M bin
0B cores
4.5K dev
0B etc
1.0K home
0B installer.failurerequests
1.0K net
177M opt
7.8G private
1.0M sbin
0B tmp
10.0G usr
0B var
That only sums to about 310 GB. That comes a lot closer to the About this mac storage output shown above.
If du doesn't show what is using this data, what can I use to determine the consumer of an unaccounted 140GB (172GB "About this mac" – 30GB shown by df) of disk space?
Best Answer
Cause:
The "thin" command from
tmutil thinlocalsnapshots
[sometimes] does not delete all data content.When this happens, after thinning the localsnapshots you may notice that not all free space were recovered [this is the OP problem he asked for solution]
The only working solution to recover space is to manually delete all localsnapshots.
After thinning you must verify if the thin command was successful by executing both commands below:
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
andtmutil listlocalsnapshotdates
If their return is EMPTY, then everything was deleted.
Otherwise if they return something, then the thinning process did not recovered all free space. (see image below for such situation where I repeatdly run the Thin command and the List command)
On the above image, everytime the command
tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates
is run, there is a list output. (so there are data residues left)Solution:
It is necessary to manually delete them all:
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <snapshot>
One by one:
After doing, check again:
There is no listing result as output. So now you have freed all possible space!
The OP got 152GB of free space by manually deleting all localsnapshots, which was not recovered by the thinning process.
This is very, very common on MacOS Catalina, I can assure it, and Apple is aware of it and changing things during the Beta phase. But it can also happen on Mojave and/or other versions.