I suspect that the glut of documents hogging my HD are TM snapshots. How do I clean them out and turn off the snapshot feature?
iMac (24-inch, M1, 2021, 2 ports)
You can launch Disk Utility and select your boot drive to see the TM local snapshots:
However, I wouldn't delete all of them but leave the latest. They will get recreated.
How much free space do you have on your boot drive?
Really appreciate the reply and direction. I have 11 GB free and I'm not sure that the Snapshots are the hog. I was trying to update Monterey OS and received the disk full message. I have 250 GB SSD internal and 2TB external for the TM backups. Trying to Manage the storage has not revealed where the 191 GB of Documents are located.
Yes. Trash has been emptied. But I can't seem to Open the Documents folder even see what's under the hood. The 300MB of files shown means there's a hecka lot of other Documents somewhere that have accumulated somehow.
If you can't open the Documents folder, that would possibly indicate a drive issue. Did you try running EntreCheck to see if it shows any problems? If you don't have a recent Time Machine backup, I'd suggest that you backup the drive just in case.
What happens when you click on Documents in Finder? Do you get any kind of error message? If you use a word processor, have you tried seeing if you can run the word processor and try to open a file in the Documents folder using the word processor to see what happens.
You might try booting in Recovery mode and try repairing the hard disk. But if the computer is working, then make sure you have a backup before trying to repair it. You don't want to make a bad problem worse. I'm assuming your 2021 iMac has an SSD and they are typically trouble-free until you exceed the write limits which is generally about 10 years of use.
EtreCheck says that the SSD is nearly full. TM successfully backed up to my external drive an hour ago. The Documents folder in Finder shows 3.9 MB on the SSD but the Documents folder shown in the image above shows 191.51GB of the 250GB SSD. That File Browser tab shows about 450MB of Documents. See above. Where can I Manage Storage to review the 190GB of Documents for possible deletion? I have full access to all available documents, word, photo, movie but I can't see the complete list of documents in storage to Manage it.
What's interesting is that it says you have zero bytes of Applications? While I don't know how big the default applications are, it would seem that it should be more than zero?
Have you checked the Users & Groups to see if there is another user setup for this computer that may be using some of the extra space?
While it's the least of your problems right now, running an SSD almost full is hard on the drive. I have two 2012 iMacs and replaced the original 1Tb drives with 2 Tb SSD's. It wasn't especially hard just a little tedious.
The applications directory you're referring to is located in the user's home directory. If you look in the sidebar, you'll see the applications directory located off root is 17.63 GB in size. For clarification:
/Applications - applications available system-wide
/Users/username/Applications - applications available to that user account
True, and while it doesn't address the issue, I wonder why one shows 17 Gb and another shows zero?
Be careful about deleting system files if you're not familiar with the operating system internals. You might delete a file which crashes the system. Certainly, you can delete "normal" document files, photos, etc. but be careful when mucking around under the hood.
I'm assuming you emptied the trash?
Try to maintain a minimum of 50 GB of free space on your boot drive for optimal system and application performance. Or more if you can. You will see a difference. Some updates require up to 45 GB of free space for unpacking and installation.
Time Machine snapshots
