Emptying trash does not free up HD capacity

murraym23,

log in as your administrative user. In Finder, press Command-Shift-U to open the Utilities folder, and run Terminal there. In the Terminal window, give it the following commands, one per line, pressing the Return key at the end of each line:

diskutil list

df -k /

sudo du -sm /Users/*

The last command will ask you for a password; give it your administrative user’s password. The password will not display as you type it in; this is a security measure.

Please include in your reply the full output from these commands.

Hello Murray,

I can't offer much more assistance. Melophage gives good advice and hopefully can help.

When you check the Storage display:

 > About This Mac > More Info… > Storage

Look at the lavender “Backups” bar between the green “Apps” and the yellow “Other”.

Is that Backups section large?

murraym23,

the df (“disk free”) command is showing that 225.6 GB of your 250.1 GB Macintosh HD volume is being used, and that 23.26 GB of that 225.6 GB in use is found in your user account. Thus, the question is where the other 202.3 GB are being used. To answer that, log in as your administrative user and try the following command:

sudo du -sm /*

I don’t know what DiskDrill is, so I don’t know how it would help you. I don’t know what cleverfiles are.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5891866?answerId=24853739022#24853739022

murraym23,

if you look at Alex.Chernenko’s most recent post in your other discussion (the bookmark in his post has a typo — he intended to point to his post here), he makes it clear what CleverFiles and Disk Drill are: CleverFiles is the organization that produces the Disk Drill app. It seems as though you have the Guaranteed Recovery feature of Disk Drill active, which is what is devouring your disk space. You probably had it active at the point when you made a Time Machine backup; when you last restored from Time Machine, you also restored the Guaranteed Recovery files of Disk Drill, which is why you still have so little free space. If you follow Alex’s advice in his post to Reset Storage in Guaranteed Recovery, you can then follow the instructions on this CleverFiles page to uninstall Disk Drill, if you no longer wish to use it.

Thanks, Melophage, and Alex. Your points were totally correct.

If I uncheck "Enable Trash protection" then I will need to rely on traditional backups for restore. So this is option acts like an automatic backup?

It's somewhat true. Disk Drill's Guaranteed Recovery monitors your Trash and keeps hidden copies of the deleted files. That's why you might see disk space not been emptied when you empty the Trash. You may reset the storage for this data protection method, and quickly gain your disk space back, OR you can configure it to keep less data protected. See the options at the above screenshot.

Also, the Recovery Vault is not available. I need to disable TRIM functionality?

Right. When TRIM is enabled, only Guaranteed Recovery can help you keep your data protected. Other recovery methods won't work. See here.

Does this matter as long as I can use Guaranteed Recovery? Maybe Recovery Vault is part of the Pro package.

Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery are the two data protection and recovery methods available in Disk Drill Basic. And GR is superior to RV in the fact that the recovery is actually guaranteed and does not rely on whether the data was partially or completely overwritten as it's impossible to overwrite it in this case.

Thanks to everyone.

Unintalling Disk Drill, cleared up the files - Used the Menu - preferences - general, remove Disk Drill.

Delleting the app just doesn't work.

Bob