Mac – Removing duplicate apps after migrating from Time Machine backup

backupmigrationtime-machine

I recently used Time Machine to migrate apps to my MacBook Pro.

What I did not realize is that they would not overwrite the old apps but rather copy over all apps again, and now I have used almost all of my disk. I would like to get rid of duplicate data and free up space on my disk.

Is there an easy way to do this? I had thought of starting over and restoring the entire disk from the Time Machine backup, but I would rather not. TIA.

Best Answer

I based my question on the assumption that the 'Purgeable Data' information reported in the Disk Utility app included duplicate app data. That was an invalid assumption. Upon further investigation, the Mac Storage view showed the space as free. The 'Purgeable Data' was actually Time Machine snapshots. I was able to trim the size of the snapshots as per the folowing article by reading all the way through and selecting the last (not checked) answer. Be advised there is a typo in his terminal command. Should be tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / $((100 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024)) 4 I don't have the points to edit his answer but someone really should. How to Clear Purgeable Data