Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Hey so my sister has a MacBook Air M1. And she told me that there's no space in her storage... I checked and it showed there are 33,138 items and it was still calculating and it was increasing... I checked all her folders and I could see only 12 items... How do I solve this issue?
MacBook Air (M1, 2020)
Storage on an APFS volume can be tricky due to how the APFS file system works.
First, make sure the Trash is empty.
Second, the only important storage value is the Free space value. Unfortunately the Free space is only specifically listed in two places....one is in Disk Utility and the other is in the Apple System Profiler under Storage. Most places in macOS will instead show the very misleading "Available" storage space. See my other post here which explains this in a bit more detail:
macOS APFS Storage & Storage Terms Explained -- hwtech - Apple Community
You can identify the largest files & folders in macOS by using the third party app OmniDiskSweeper. You will need to give OmniDiskSweeper Full Disk Access in the Privacy & Security System Settings in order to for the app to view most areas on the drive (even then, there will be some areas that are off limits to the app).
Many times storage space is taken up by the hidden APFS snapshots usually associated with backups. Normally these APFS snapshots will be deleted at some unknown point in the future once the backups have been transferred to external media, however, some snapshots may remain longer depending on the backup app's settings. I believe Time Machine will keep at least one APFS snapshot at all times to allow for faster access to the most recent backup (and for when you may not have your backup drive with you). Recently deleted items may still remain in the hidden APFS snapshots until that snapshot is deleted.
View APFS snapshots in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
Use OmniDiskSweeper as I described in order to identify the largest files & folders on the system so you can either transfer those items to external media or delete them. However, there are some areas that OmniDiskSweeper is unable to look. APFS backup snapshots are one of those areas since APFS snapshots are kept hidden from view except when using Disk Utility as described in the Apple article I linked.
If you are unable to use OmniDiskSweeper, then you should get assistance from the local Apple Store or from an Apple Authorized Service Provider, or from another local Apple expert.
I'm sorry but everything you said went over my head... I'm very bad at using MacOS... If possible we can connect some other platform.
What is taking so much space?
