Other Volumes taking up lots of disk space

I own a 2016 MacBook Air running Big Sur v11.6. I've never really been one for downloading the latest OS so please forgive me if this is hideously old. I use the MacBook Air quite sparingly for very basic things and would like to use it for more going forward.


I keep getting messages saying my drive is nearly full, but I'm certain it can't be. I just don't think I've stored enough on it.


I opened Disk Utility and found that my Apple SSD SM0256G Media > Container disk1 stats were as follows:


Macintosh HD - 22.35GB

Macintosh HD - Data - 222.8GB

VM - 2.15GB

Preboot - 466.7MB

1 Not Mounted - 884.9MB

Free - 2.14GB


Please can someone advice this total novice how to free up some disk space? Thank you.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.6

Posted on Oct 11, 2023 11:31 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 11, 2023 9:06 PM

You have no space to clear up, not by those "extra" partitions which are normal, needed, & tiny compared to the 30-40 GB Free Space you need.


Look for iOS backups…

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup


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


tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / # deletes all the snapshots



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4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 11, 2023 9:06 PM in response to jamesinbury

You have no space to clear up, not by those "extra" partitions which are normal, needed, & tiny compared to the 30-40 GB Free Space you need.


Look for iOS backups…

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup


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


tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / # deletes all the snapshots



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Other Volumes taking up lots of disk space

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