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200GB free space lost from APFS boot drive

Recently (last month) I upgraded from Sierra to High Sierra on one of my Macs. I now am confronted with 200GB of the 500GB 'lost'. That is, when running OmniDiskSweeper as root, I find 255GB files, but according to df, 460GB is in use. Removing large files (e.g. I removed a 33GB directory with rm) does not increase free space. I've run repair on the volume (system in target disk mode, repair executed from another Mac).

The disk was full yesterday (unexepected) and the system died. What pushed it over the edge was CrashPlan crashing and writing 12.5GB cores. I used the string command to try to find where the core dumps came from but string gave errors like "malformed object LC_SEGMENT_64 fileoff field plus filesize extends past the end of the file". That sounded like file system corruption to me, hence the attempt to repair.

I first tried to remove those core dumps to free up data, and that worked to give me 40GB. But I removed more from the disk and I never got that space back. Not even the repair gave me my disk space back. I now have a file system with 210GB space missing.

I cannot use DiskWarrior as it doesn't handle APFS. So, what can I do?

Mac mini, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6), Server 5.6

Posted on Sep 27, 2018 3:49 AM

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Posted on Sep 27, 2018 11:26 PM

It turned out the culprit of not freeing up space was Time Machine and local snapshots on AFPS. See Why doesn't removing (rm) files free up disk space? The error messages may have been a red herring, though they are suspect. It seems to me APFS can get into serious trouble when the disk gets full, so I'll have to keep an eye on keeping well away from the limit.

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Sep 27, 2018 11:26 PM in response to Gerben Wierda

It turned out the culprit of not freeing up space was Time Machine and local snapshots on AFPS. See Why doesn't removing (rm) files free up disk space? The error messages may have been a red herring, though they are suspect. It seems to me APFS can get into serious trouble when the disk gets full, so I'll have to keep an eye on keeping well away from the limit.

200GB free space lost from APFS boot drive

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