Before I installed Monterey (12.5.1) on my M1 macbook air I had 45GB of space free on my harddrive (total hardrive capacity is 512GB).
After the installation and restart I now only have 6GB free. Please help me figure out why the upgrade to Monterey is using up so much space and if there's a fix for this. Thanks!
MacBook Air 13″
Might be this...
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
Might be this...
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
You do not have enough free space on your Mac, even before the operating system upgrade. You should keep approximately 20% free. I would work on freeing up space before trying to "fix" the space taken by the upgrade.
Free up storage space - Apple Support
Ok guys. Just a quick update. I guess I've let this situation be for a few days and maybe the new OS install etc has settled down - system data as slowly done down from 200gb to 58gb.
That, plus all the files I've deleted, has resulted in my local drive now having 180gb free. So I guess all is well. Fingers crossed that it stays that way. Thank you everyone for all your help!
Have you emptied the trash?
Here's the quickest way to find where the space is used...
Thanks to Bob Harris file sizes, open Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal:...
sudo ** -hx | sort -h
sudo will ask you for an Admin password that won't be echoed.
Carefully type your admin password when asked & hit enter.
See the Note below.
The files that you have control over are located in the Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music and Movies folders. You can use this free app, GrandPerspective, to find the largest files on your drive so you can determine if they can be deleted or moved to an external HD for storage.
NOTE: you can empty the Downloads folder after the apps and/or updates that were downloaded have been installed or applied. Some users have found a couple of Gigabytes of files in their Downloads folder which are no longer needed.
So one thing I've realised is that icloud backup takes up a lot of space on my Mac. I've set it up so it backs up all my documents etc. When I turn on Optimise Mac Storage from preferences/icloud then it starts storing all my backed-up files on my local hard drive, in this situation my system files are 88GB.
However when I turn off Optimise Mac Storage I guess it removes files from my mac and just keeps them in icloud. When this happens my Documents size reduces to about 45gb but system files balloon up to 200gb.
It's almost like system files are just trying to fill whatever empty hard drive space I have left. I hope this makes sens
So one thing I've realised is that icloud backup takes up a lot of space on my Mac. I've set it up so it backs up all my documents etc. When I turn on Optimise Mac Storage from preferences/icloud then it starts storing all my backed-up files on my local hard drive, in this situation my system files are 88GB.
However when I turn off Optimise Mac Storage I guess it removes files from my mac and just keeps them in icloud. When this happens my Documents size reduces to about 45gb but system files balloon up to 200gb.
It's almost like system files are just trying to fill whatever empty hard drive space I create. I hope this makes sense.
gibran64 wrote:
So one thing I've realised is that icloud backup takes up a lot of space on my Mac.
iCloud is not a backup option for macOS. iCloud on macOS is just a cloud based file syncing service. If you make a catastrophic file modification (edit or delete it completely), then that catastrophic action is transmitted to every other copy of that file on all your other devices which has iCloud enabled.
Now, iOS on iPhones & iPads do actually have an iCloud backup option in addition to the iCloud file syncing service. The two iCloud features are completely different.
You need to make sure you have a good backup of your computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. There are a lot more new ways to permanently lose access to the data stored on the internal SSD of recent Macs due to all the hardware, software, and security changes. Apple includes the Time Machine backup software with macOS to allow you to back up your computer and external drives. I have no idea how to backup your data that is syncing to iCloud or any other cloud based file syncing service since I don't use any of them.
@BDAqua is doing a great job assisting with your storage issues.
Hi Bob. Thanks for the feedback. So you're saying that Monterey requires 40GB of space?
Also related, I have started deleting files from my PC to try and free up space but I'm noticing that the space I'm freeing up is also slowly being consumed. I feel there is an issue with the upgrade. If you have any more information on this I'd be really grateful!
Hi BDAqua,
Thanks for the advice. Definitely emptied the trash a bunch of times as I've been deleting things to free up space.
I used the sudo thing you suggested to see what is tying up hard drive space and discovered some old folders I'd forgotten about so I'm deleting those. I managed to go from 6gb free to 80gb free after deleting old files.
However about 10 minutes after I was done the hard drive space dropped to 3.59gb. Something is actively consuming space. If you have any thoughts on this I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
Understood. I was just pointing out that toggling on/off the Optimise Mac Storage option in icloud was causing the amount of free space to change on my local hard drive. But whenever it would change the System Data would grow and shrink to use up the available space. It went from 88gb to 200gb. So there is something weird going on with system data.
All the help from @BDAqua is much appreciated. Unfortunately none of the tips seemed to have panned out. I'm hoping they have a few more tricks up their sleeve to help me figure this out!
Tried this - it didn't pop up any results. I don't use time machine so assuming this isn't the issue.
Good work my friend, thanks for the update! :)
M1 Macbook Air - Just Installed OS Monterey and it's consumed 40GB of space!
