High Sierra on my MacBook Pro has set a large quantity of my files as "restricted". How do I remove the "restricted" status so that the files are revealed, and so that they can be deleted?
VIN,MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011), macOS High Sierra (10.13.6)
That big amount of space is probably Time Machine local snapshots.
You may try deleting the Time Machine local snapshots.
To find which local snapshots currently exist, type the following in Terminal:
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
To regain some space, type
sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 10000000000 4
This tries the "thin" the snapshots in order to gain the desired space if possible
(the large number above is approximately 10G and the 4 is the highest "urgency" level)
Restricted is a flag used to prevent even the root user from altering a file. It is part of System Integrity Protection.
Using things that purport to clean, optimize, protect, boost, or otherwise maintain you Mac will result in poor performance.
I have never heard of "restricted" files. It appears that you lack permission to access or delete such files.
Where are those files? Who owns them? Can you do a Get Info on one of them and post a screenshot?
You cannot, and with very good reason, delete or move files that are in some system designated locations.
However, when the size of the restricted space exceeds the space for all the rest of my files on the disk, somethings got to give.
Maybe you're just getting a garbage response from a garbage app that has no idea how the OS works.
As Luis points out, it could be local snapshots which most of those garbage apps don't understand.
Some people have had snapshots that get stuck.
Others think they are "stuck" because an app bypasses the os looking for disk space and doesn't find enough available. If the app had requested space through the OS, it would have purged the snapshots and provided the space.
The issue of restricted files (actually restricted space) revealed itself to me when using Space Gremlin Pro. The link to the FAQ is http://www.spacegremlinapp.com/mac/faq.html#answer6. In spite of the terminal command method of starting Space Gremlin, the files involved do not show up, so I cannot locate them in Finder to examine and change permissions.
Apparently, this "restricted file/space" issue began with El Capitan.
In the meantime, I'm using Clonezilla to make an image of the drive (in case of disaster) and will reformat the drive and use Carbon Copy Cloner to write the files back to the original drive. Wish me luck!
I understand the idea behind the restricted flag. However, when the size of the restricted space exceeds the space for all the rest of my files on the disk, somethings got to give. In my case, I have something like 256Gb of disk space "restricted".No file system should grow forever without some means to pare it down. Come on, Apple!
Restricted Files
