My Mac Book air 2015 Hard Drive suddenly fills itself and i cant even use the computer sometimes. i have to boot in safe mode so i can free up space. i free a couple of gigs in safe mode and i reboot. half an hour later i have about 8mb again of space and i cant do anything. What Kind of program could be copying stuff to my HD and are there any good free softwares i can use to analyse what exactly keeps taking up space.
MacBook Air 13", macOS 10.14
First, if you want to erase everything, then the OS is erased too and you need to reinstall that. Second, TM will not do a regular back up to your internal drive (only an external drive), it will only create those snapshots on the internal.
As for the snapshots: as I said, I don't use TM, so my knowledge is very limited - see if anything helps here:
https://www.macworld.com/article/3260635/how-to-delete-time-machine-snapshots-on-your-mac.html
And, the document I linked to has a section on how to delete them manually:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015
You can also download, run and then post here (using the third toolbar icon from right - additional text) the results of the etrecheck report (available at the app store). That might give us an idea.
Lastly, there is Omnidisksweeper which will tell you what exactly you've got:
Another possibility: do you have Time Machine running or creating snapshots (and haven't plugged in the external drive for Time Machine in a while)?
I do not use it, but I think you just turn it off. Or simply plug in your external and let TM run. Do a search on your hard drive for snapshots.
Apple recommends that you keep about 10-15GB of free space at all times because the operating system and programs you run must create temporary cache files to operate. it is possible that you simply have way too much stuff and need to move some to an external drive.
Boot into safe mode again and immediately look at how much free space you have. If it is a couple GB or less this is probably the issue.
it seems to be disabled. the box was unchecked. also i cant find any back up folders anywhere on the harddrive. is there another way to check for snapshots? When i click the 'about this mac' section to check the storage it says i have more than 50GB in documents but nothing in documents folder is even close to that big. could it be hidden files? or a virus maybe?
also how can i erase everything and reset the computer afresh without re installing OS and all that.
i literally have no stuff. i doubt thats the issue.
ok, this is likely. i haven't plugged in any external drive in a while. Im not sure how Time Machine works. How can i disable it?
Mac HD keeps filling itself
