Confused about macos free disk space

It confuses me why different methods by MacOS report free disk space differently. In my case the difference is almost 50 GB. I have a 2019 13" Macbook Pro with 256 GB disk space and when I check for available disk space I get different results depending on from where I check:

1) About this Mac -> storage shows I have about 94 GB free

2) run "df -H /" from terminal shows me I have 50 GB free


When I go manually over all my folders (home and desktop content plus whatever the system reports as "used by system" ) then I too get that I should have about 90 GB free. So why "df -H /" shows differently? I would presume that checking from terminal is more accurate but then I do not understand where is my "missing" additional 40 GB of files.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 4, 2020 1:43 AM

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3 replies

Aug 4, 2020 8:20 AM in response to Petsodon

Forget the next to worthless "Storage" report.


OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/


Purging local backups

Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.

Start Terminal from spotlight.

At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates.

Hit enter.


Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.

Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.


Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.

Hit enter.

Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required


http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html

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Confused about macos free disk space

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