Where did my storage go?

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Level 1

8 points

Where did my storage go?

Hello.

I had a message on my iMac saying my disk is saturated. I am unable to download any application and launch some. Which is weird because when I go to Storage, it shows that I still have 500gb available. I emptied the trash bin and removed some files so I should have plenty of storage available.

In the hard drive disk information, it also shows I have 585gb left but it also says 1tb is used out of the 1.03tb.

I am running on Catalina 10.15.5

I am unable to update my mac or even delete TimeMachine snapshots.

"iMac-de-Clement:~ clement$ sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots

sudo: unable to write to /var/db/sudo/ts/clement: No space left on device"

The following screen is french so here's a quick translation:

Go = Gb

To = Tb

Capacité=Capacity

Disponible=Available

Utilisé=Used

Thank you!

iMac 21.5″ 4K, macOS 10.15

Posted on Sep 4, 2020 4:56 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

BDAqua

Level 10

240,833 points

Sep 4, 2020 6:20 AM in response to clement170

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode?

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

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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