Large Trash Empty - Ventura - Disk Space was not recovered

Please go to Disk Utility, highlight Macintosh HD and click on View APFS Snapshots.

Since you are using Time Machine then you will see snapshots which reside on the internal disk. These filesystem snapshots are then copied over to the external APFS Time Machine backup. After 24-48 hours the snapshots on the internal disk should be deleted by macOS.

So look for anything weird in the list of snapshots, such as old snapshots that shouldn't be there. You should only see things from Today and Yesterday, providing you leave the external Time Machine attached. If you are infrequently attaching the Time Machine drive, you will no doubt see additional older APFS snapshots.

If you have been keeping the backup drive attached and you see snapshots older than today or yesterday. It is possible to delete those snapshots. But you really need to take care as once you delete a snapshot it's permanently removed. Do not delete the snapshots that were made in the last 48 hours.

There are other files outside of APFS snapshots taking up storage space. Here are a few apps that can scan your disk and give you a graphical representation of file sizes. So you can drill down and find things you are willing to delete. Grand Perspective, OmniDisk, and DaisyDisk. The first two have been around a very long time. I use DaisyDisk but all three of these tools work much the same. When using these tools, you need to grant them Full Disk Access in System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Full Disk Access.

I have been having this problems for years, too; many machines, many MacOS versions.

just for the many who do not read the question: the following works if and only if your problem is that (1) you deleted N gigabytes of files from the disk, then (2) emptied trash, and (3) did NOT gain N gigabytes of free space but some number substantially smaller than N (I have, e.g., experienced deleting 50 GB and gaining 2 GB).

I just found a hack that worked for me. little of a catch: you'll have to be comfortable with terminal. If you are:

here is where I found the solution from Jack Zimmermann:

https://www.jackenhack.com/mac-os-remove-purgeable-high-sierra/

is simple, although I make it sound complicated in the following

in short:

open Terminal (shift-command>Terminal)

in the terminal window type something of the type:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/stupidfile.crap

(

• all characters essential! no typo!
• exception: naming and location of file, here called 'stupidfile.crap' you can name it anything you want,
• "~/" will make the file end up in /Users/yourname on your hard disk (often called 'Macintosh HD')

)

result: disk will be totally filled up

may be observe what happens, how stupidfile.crap grows and when the available disk space has dropped below 2GB, you stop the above by going to the Terminal window and typing

control-C

next: delete the file ~/stupidfile.crap and empty your trash (e.g. back to terminal

rm -f ~/stupidfile.crap

(or whatever you chose to name the file).

now the system should have freed up the space for the files you deleted at the first place

if it works for you: thanks to Jack Zimmermann (link above)

You are most welcome. Seems that the Micromat TechToolsPro software created APFS snapshots likely prior to attempting data recovery, etc. Those snapshots were not cleaned up by Time Machine but where stuck claiming valuable disk space.

Whenever an APFS snapshot is made it doesn't consume space until you start making changes to the filesystem after the snapshot was created. At that point, the more changes that occur over time, the larger the snapshot grows. You likely cleared that amount of space by deleting other things. Not realizing these older snapshots were growing to equalize the differences.

simpleton42 wrote:

I have been having this problems for years, too; many machines, many MacOS versions.

just for the many who do not read the question: the following works if and only if your problem is that (1) you deleted N gigabytes of files from the disk, then (2) emptied trash, and (3) did NOT gain N gigabytes of free space but some number substantially smaller than N (I have, e.g., experienced deleting 50 GB and gaining 2 GB).

I just found a hack that worked for me. little of a catch: you'll have to be comfortable with terminal. If you are:

here is where I found the solution from Jack Zimmermann:

https://www.jackenhack.com/mac-os-remove-purgeable-high-sierra/

This is EXTREMELY dangerous! When an APFS volume completely runs out of Free storage space, then the user may not be able to delete anything from the volume in order to free up the storage due to how the APFS file system works (Apple does not have a built-in APFS safe buffer zone). If that happens and there are no APFS snapshots to delete, then the user will lose all their data that was not backed up since it would require completely erasing the drive & reinstalling macOS to fix the problem. Depending on a person's system....it may not be possible to stop at 2GB.

The safer solution to convert the Purgeable space to Free space has already been suggested by others which involves removing APFS snapshots using a simple method involving Disk Utility.

Also your command to delete the temporary junk file is dangerous as well since you used the "-f" force option. It would be much better & safer to use the " -i " option so the user is prompted to confirm the deletion. Keep in mind many people who see the posts on the Apple forums are not familiar with the dangers of the command line and how a simple accidental typographical error could delete all their data. Just like you may not be aware of the extreme danger of running out of Free storage space on a macOS file system. With APFS file system, it is possible the user won't be able to delete any files, but with the older HFS+ file system running out of Free space can actually corrupt the files and file system.....a co-worker personally encountered this years ago.

At the very least, the you should mention multiple times that the user should make sure to have a good backup before attempting your suggestion.