200GB 'hidden space' in DaisyDisk

[cosmo811]

Hi there,

I'm trying to clean up my MacBook Pro's drive. I've transferred a bunch of the bigger items like games and videos over to my external SSD.

I've run a DaisyDisk scan to see why I somehow only have about 290GB free of the 512GB internal SSD, and DaisyDisk says there's 212.8GB of 'Hidden Space'. Clicking through, there's 180.9GB of 'Purgeable Space' and 31.1GB 'Still Hidden'. DaisyDisk says the 'purgeable space' is "taken up by Time Machine's temporary backups and system caches."

Now I did previously use Time Machine, but I've gone into System Preferences and basically unchecked everything. I've removed the backup disk, turned off 'back up automatically', and that space still seems to be there. I really don't need nearly 200GB of backups on my internal SSD! Any idea how to clean this up? Restarting my laptop or something to give it a 'nudge' to sort itself out? Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Codpeace]

You might try this in Terminal:

sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4

It thins local snapshots substantially and might help you recover some of that space.

 

[cosmo811]

You might try this in Terminal:

sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4

It thins local snapshots substantially and might help you recover some of that space.

I just did this, and now Finder says there's '499.54GB free' which... can't be correct, I've still got a bunch of apps, photos, documents etc. on the computer...

EDIT: Wait, no, now it says 372.36, but in the Get Info on Macintosh HD it says '25.02GB purgeable.' That sounds about right now looking at DaisyDisk finally. I think this looks about right now, thanks!

 

[Codpeace]

Cool -- glad it helped!