Deleting huge files, but not freeing up space!?

[BigMcGuire]

Hi mate, I've just replied above about the CCC snapshots. Maybe you could take look at the screenshot. Its. huge amount of space!

I'm confused as to why I would need TM making constant snapshots, and CCC making snapshots too, and also why have them at all? They are stored on the same drive so if that fails they are all gone. But I'm backing up regularly to other drives with CCC and TM, so why isnt that enough? Is it just to save deleted files, or to restore to an earlier point in the last day or two? If so, I'm not sure its worth the space!

I'm a bit confused about what to do. thanks for everyones help, I feel I might be getting close to sorting it out!

@mikecwest did a great job explaining everything above.

They do snapshots to offload to external drives later. So, say I delete an important document because I don't think I need it - they "save" this temporarily so they can offload it to the external drive when I hook it up to an external drive. Also, this makes restoring that important document easy without needing my external drive there. It's a backup of a backup in a way.

I use both CCC and TM because my data is super important to me. I realize it's a bit redundant but you can't ever have too many backups. That and I have a 1TB SSD with only 180GB used so I don't mind the extra space used. I use CCC to delete large snapshots if I remove something large I don't need.

I've noticed that TM snapshots far more regularly than CCC does. But I'm no expert.

If I had a 256GB SSD or 128GB SSD, I'd only use one to snapshot and just use CCC to copy to an external drive without snapshots.

 

[kohlson]

314gb snapshot for CCC!

I realize you have been getting a lot of input, and in some sense this is like an old-time movie, with the train racing down the tracks toward impending disaster (you run out of disk space).

TM makes tries to keep "current" by making a local snapshot on a pretty regular basis. If the designated drive is not connected, it's kept on the startup disk until the backup disk is connected. In my experience these files are large-ish, but not terribly large. In any event I don't think TM local backup will consume all available disk space on the startup disk.

I used to use CCC, and one of the things I remember from it was (to me) the UI was confusing. This may no longer be the case. But - and I am just checking here - are the Source and Target volumes different?

 

[madrich]

The computer was new just a few months back. If you resin tall the OS, does it keep everything else, your installed programs and all your documents? ~Or do you have to reinstall everything . Sorry for the noob questions

If you reinstalled the OS then it erases everything else; unless you later use the migration assistant to import anything else.

 

[robodelfy]

The time machine local snapshots keeps a history of changes...Lets say you are working on a document, and say, "Gee, I wish I had left that file how it was on Tuesday." You can go "back in time" and recover it in that state.

Now the part that might shed more light on it for you, many people do not leave their backup drive connected all the time, or may not have one at all.

Ok, if you follow so far, you have basically a "running tab" or changes. These should be combined into your "time machine backup drive," each time that you connect it, at which time the "local backups" are removed.

A couple things could go wrong here, lets say you have your time machine backup on a hard drive you named "tacocat." You decided to re-partition that drive, and add an additional partition. OK, now you just altered the UUID of the drive, and time machine no longer realizes it is the same drive, and doesn't combine the local snapshots into the backup drive.

Lets say you just forgot to, intentionally did not, was too busy too, or maybe didn't know you needed to connect your backup drive, it won't get updated. Your local snapshot will get bigger and bigger.

As far as CCC snapshots go, I am assuming that CCC has a similar method of operation.

You can easily turn off time machine, or if you prefer to keep your backup, you can just plug in your time machine drive everynight, and let it synchronize while you sleep.

If you have a "Time Capsule," make sure it is setup properly.

Also, as far as having both CCC and TM backups at the same time, some people are paranoid about data loss, and might use two separate backup methods. If you do this, make sure that you attached both CCC and TM backup drives frequently to reduce the footprint of the "local snapshots."

You might turn off TM if you prefer CCC or vise versa. If you don't really care about data loss, turn off both.

Thanks, yeah I think I get it. I didn't realise that TM local snapshots were removed/moved when you plug in your TM drive to backup. I didn't notice this happen when I plugged in my drive.

And I'm sure the wasn't happening with CCC as I had plugged in my CCC drive and updated the clone many times, yet that huge 300gb snapshot was still hiding! I deleted it now, and it was very satisfying to watch all the space come back in seconds!

I'm still a little confused about what to do, whether to leave these snapshots on for both TM and CCC, or only one, and if so which as they seem to work differently.

I have 3 backup drives. 1 TM, and 1 CCC, that I keep with me when I travel, but leave at wherever I'm staying. Then one CCC drive back at my family home.

I do this because TM machine gives useful snapshots of the machine at various times, where as CCC just clones the drive and keeps any changed files in the safety net folder. So it's good to have both. CCC is so much faster as well, so I do that more regularly.

Who would have thought backing up would take so much energy
[doublepost=1536660313][/doublepost]

@mikecwest did a great job explaining everything above.

They do snapshots to offload to external drives later. So, say I delete an important document because I don't think I need it - they "save" this temporarily so they can offload it to the external drive when I hook it up to an external drive. Also, this makes restoring that important document easy without needing my external drive there. It's a backup of a backup in a way.

I use both CCC and TM because my data is super important to me. I realize it's a bit redundant but you can't ever have too many backups. That and I have a 1TB SSD with only 180GB used so I don't mind the extra space used. I use CCC to delete large snapshots if I remove something large I don't need.

I've noticed that TM snapshots far more regularly than CCC does. But I'm no expert.

If I had a 256GB SSD or 128GB SSD, I'd only use one to snapshot and just use CCC to copy to an external drive without snapshots.

Thanks, yeah I talked about some of this in my reply just now to someone else.

I also use both. I've deleted my CCC snapshot and recovered most of this space thank god! But now it hasn't created a new CCC snapshot, Im not sure when it will. I can see 4 TM ones in CCC, all created today and yesterday, but they are tiny, only 40mb each.Are you sure CCC shows all the TM snapshots? I just dont understand how they can be so small

thanks for the help everyone
[doublepost=1536660430][/doublepost]

I realize you have been getting a lot of input, and in some sense this is like an old-time movie, with the train racing down the tracks toward impending disaster (you run out of disk space).

TM makes tries to keep "current" by making a local snapshot on a pretty regular basis. If the designated drive is not connected, it's kept on the startup disk until the backup disk is connected. In my experience these files are large-ish, but not terribly large. In any event I don't think TM local backup will consume all available disk space on the startup disk.

I used to use CCC, and one of the things I remember from it was (to me) the UI was confusing. This may no longer be the case. But - and I am just checking here - are the Source and Target volumes different?

Thanks, you'll see in my other replies that it was one huge CCC snapshot, which I deleted. CCC interface is actually very simple, I didn't know about the sidebar which is where the snapshots were hiding. I'm still trying to work out exactly what to do with each program/backup.

 

[BigMcGuire]

Yep. I deleted 20GB of a backup that I didn’t need anymore. This of course resulted in no returned space so I went into ccc and wiped out that snapshot. Doesn’t happen too often as most of the time the data I’m dealing with is a few meg at most.

 

[mikecwest]

Yep. I deleted 20GB of a backup that I didn’t need anymore. This of course resulted in no returned space so I went into ccc and wiped out that snapshot. Doesn’t happen too often as most of the time the data I’m dealing with is a few meg at most.

You might even have TM snapshots of your CCC Snapshots, and CCC Snapshots of your TM Snapshots....You might wasn’t to make sure that the TM snapshot is excluded from CCC backups, and that the CCC backup is excluded from TM backup, if not I can see you ending up with backup of backups of backups.....That could easily fill your drive.

 

[Fishrrman]

I've kept cloned backups since I began using OS X.
I've NEVER used Time Machine -- and never will.
I've even removed TM's app and pref pane from my Macs.

Never lost data because of that backup strategy.
Never seen a "CCC snapshot". That's a good thing.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I've kept cloned backups since I began using OS X.
I've NEVER used Time Machine -- and never will.
I've even removed TM's app and pref pane from my Macs.

Never lost data because of that backup strategy.
Never seen a "CCC snapshot". That's a good thing.

Forgive my ignorance if you've posted this elsewhere - I'm very curious as to what your backup strategy is. What do you use to clone your hard drive? Very interested. Thanks!

 

[Fishrrman]

"Forgive my ignorance if you've posted this elsewhere - I'm very curious as to what your backup strategy is. What do you use to clone your hard drive?"

I use CarbonCopyCloner and keep clones in various places.
That's about it.

 

[BigMcGuire]

"Forgive my ignorance if you've posted this elsewhere - I'm very curious as to what your backup strategy is. What do you use to clone your hard drive?"

I use CarbonCopyCloner and keep clones in various places.
That's about it.

I've been leaning towards this too and will most likely do it as well. No need to have double backups! I really like CCC and am a very happy customer. Thanks for the info.

 

[CynicMike]

If you haven't found a solution yet and are using Carbon Copy Cloner, check out my response on another thread ("https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...space-what-gives.2052647/page-2#post-26557229")

 

[gr8pics]

Same problem here, as of the past two OS versions.
It just to work 15 years prior to this, no it takes 10-15 mins before the updated space shows after emptying the trash.
Is it a new annoy feature, since Apple choose not to fix it?

 

[tillkrueger]

I know this is an old thread, but I have been having the same problem for what seems like at least 2-3 years (definitely on Mojave and now Catalina).

I have fully committed to Catalina now, after doing a completely fresh install from scratch to rule out any left-over gunk from my years-old work-environment and trying to create as lean a system as possible (as close to 200GB as possible with *everything* installed), and after hitting 280GB and analysing my 1TB SSD/NVMe (MBP 2018) I found my Logic samples taking up nearly 80GB...I created some sim-links and moved them to my external SSD, but Catalina just wouldn't release those 80GB, no matter what I did...emptied trash, of course, waited for hours, rebooted a few times.

Since I had done a full backup right before installing Logic and all those samples (anticipating that I'd go way over my 200GB allowance), I decided to prepare for a system restore and backed up the system one more time with Carbon Copy Cloner, *after* removing those 80GB and just to be safe, and strangely enough, right after CCC finished its full backup, the available space on my internal NVM jumped back to 800GB!

What's up with that? Does CCC change/fix anything relating to how Finder calculates free space?

But that wasn't the end of it...I proceeded to install UnrealEngine 4 (both 4.23 and the new 4.24 preview), which took up over 40GB of space, before deciding that I should have installed the engines to the external SSD, so I proceeded to uninstall them, only to find that the space wasn't released afterwards *again*!

I did yet another backup with those two engines un-installed, and the CCC backup read out as about 180GB (CCC did *not* release the missing space of my system this time, though).

So then I rebooted into Recovery, formatted my internal NVM, restored from the CCC backup, and when I logged back in, lo-and-behold, my System showed 800GB of free space again.

What could be causing this erratic Finder behaviour regarding available space?
Is there some terminal command I should execute to re-index the part of Finder that reports available space, and if so, what is it?

Phew! sorry for the long-winded post, but I have scoured the interwebs far and wide and for years, and I think that this needs to be discussed, so that others who have the same issue can hopefully find this thread and know that they are not alone...and maybe even read about what this is caused by and how to avoid it happening...without having to backup and restore their system :-/

 

[Jaya Lin]

I know this is an old thread, but I have been having the same problem for what seems like at least 2-3 years (definitely on Mojave and now Catalina).

I have fully committed to Catalina now, after doing a completely fresh install from scratch to rule out any left-over gunk from my years-old work-environment and trying to create as lean a system as possible (as close to 200GB as possible with *everything* installed), and after hitting 280GB and analysing my 1TB SSD/NVMe (MBP 2018) I found my Logic samples taking up nearly 80GB...I created some sim-links and moved them to my external SSD, but Catalina just wouldn't release those 80GB, no matter what I did...emptied trash, of course, waited for hours, rebooted a few times.

Since I had done a full backup right before installing Logic and all those samples (anticipating that I'd go way over my 200GB allowance), I decided to prepare for a system restore and backed up the system one more time with Carbon Copy Cloner, *after* removing those 80GB and just to be safe, and strangely enough, right after CCC finished its full backup, the available space on my internal NVM jumped back to 800GB!

What's up with that? Does CCC change/fix anything relating to how Finder calculates free space?

But that wasn't the end of it...I proceeded to install UnrealEngine 4 (both 4.23 and the new 4.24 preview), which took up over 40GB of space, before deciding that I should have installed the engines to the external SSD, so I proceeded to uninstall them, only to find that the space wasn't released afterwards *again*!

I did yet another backup with those two engines un-installed, and the CCC backup read out as about 180GB (CCC did *not* release the missing space of my system this time, though).

So then I rebooted into Recovery, formatted my internal NVM, restored from the CCC backup, and when I logged back in, lo-and-behold, my System showed 800GB of free space again.

What could be causing this erratic Finder behaviour regarding available space?
Is there some terminal command I should execute to re-index the part of Finder that reports available space, and if so, what is it?

Phew! sorry for the long-winded post, but I have scoured the interwebs far and wide and for years, and I think that this needs to be discussed, so that others who have the same issue can hopefully find this thread and know that they are not alone...and maybe even read about what this is caused by and how to avoid it happening...without having to backup and restore their system :-/

Some ideas.

I had the same problem, the "disk almost full" message came up repeatedly. I deleted 30GB of space but only about 2GB seemed to come back as "available" space.

However I later tried deleting more space, and this second bit of freed up space did all show up in my available space count. To be clear, the 30GB initially deleted never came back, but the 10GB I deleted second time around, that did come back.

What might be happening is the system "likes" to use the SSD for temporary storage of caches and such things, but as the disk gets fuller it puts that stuff as second priority. When I deleted 30GB the system suddenly thought "Woohoo, free space!", and quickly filled up that newly freed up space with caches, indexes and such things that make the system work smoother.

Or perhaps the system had some of its working files compressed and it uncompressed them as soon as there was space. But the result is the same, I.e., the system might have simply used up the first lot of newly freed up space for its own purposes as soon as we freed it up.

One way to check might be like a previous poster wrote: Go to About This Mac: Storage. Look at the breakdown of disk usage before and after you free up some space. You might see documents, photos, apps etc adding up correctly, and only "system" increasing in size. That would prove the system is just grabbing that space, which would solve the mystery of the missing space.

 

[JoJoBee88]

Hoping to revive this thread as I'm experiencing somewhat of a similar issue. I have a macbook Pro 2017 on macOS Catalina Version 10.15.5. It has 250gb of disk space, but only shows less than 1gb of free space. It shows 226gb in the "other" category under System Storage. The odd thing is, whenever I permanently delete items from the trash, I do not regain free space, and the "Other" category increases in that amount (like the files aren't actually being deleted, but moved somewhere else).

I was excited to see that local snapshots seemed to be the culprit for most folks, however, I'm not finding any stored local snapshots on my computer to delete which is incredibly disappointing.

The other detail that I think plays a big factor with my issue, I have a 2TB portable backup drive I use with TimeMachine. I purchased this drive because my computer was acting up, so I can' t say for sure if this particular issue (other folder increasing with any permanent removal of files from trash) came before or after bringing the portable hardrive into the picture.

I saw a lot of talk about CCC and how in some cases it actually restored some free space for some people. The problem I'm facing is, I can't install any new applications because my free space is practically nothing. I can't even keep my outlook app open (requires 150mb).

There's a whole lot more steps I took to resolve this issue that I have not included to spare you the detail, but feel free to ask and I'm happy to share.

I'm to a point of just wiping it and attempting a fresh restore, but would love to hear any other suggestions if a restore isn't necessary.

@casperes1996 and @mikecwest (pinging you two as you seemed to be fantastic resources )


jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ df -H
/dev/disk1s5 251G 11G 81M 100% 487499 2447613821 0% /
devfs 348k 348k 0B 100% 1176 0 100% /dev
/dev/disk1s1 251G 238G 81M 100% 2282307 2445819013 0% /System/Volumes/Data
/dev/disk1s4 251G 1.1G 81M 94% 2 2448101318 0% /private/var/vm
map auto_home 0B 0B 0B 100% 0 0 100% /System/Volumes/Data/home
map -fstab 0B 0B 0B 100% 0 0 100% /System/Volumes/Data/Network/Servers


jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *251.0 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 314.6 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 250.7 GB disk0s2/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +250.7 GB disk1
Physical Store disk0s2
1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data 237.6 GB disk1s1
2: APFS Volume Preboot 84.0 MB disk1s2
3: APFS Volume Recovery 528.5 MB disk1s3
4: APFS Volume VM 1.1 GB disk1s4
5: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 11.2 GB disk1s5/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk2
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1
2: Apple_HFS Backup Plus 2.0 TB disk2s2

 

[casperes1996]

Hoping to revive this thread as I'm experiencing somewhat of a similar issue. I have a macbook Pro 2017 on macOS Catalina Version 10.15.5. It has 250gb of disk space, but only shows less than 1gb of free space. It shows 226gb in the "other" category under System Storage. The odd thing is, whenever I permanently delete items from the trash, I do not regain free space, and the "Other" category increases in that amount (like the files aren't actually being deleted, but moved somewhere else).

I was excited to see that local snapshots seemed to be the culprit for most folks, however, I'm not finding any stored local snapshots on my computer to delete which is incredibly disappointing.

The other detail that I think plays a big factor with my issue, I have a 2TB portable backup drive I use with TimeMachine. I purchased this drive because my computer was acting up, so I can' t say for sure if this particular issue (other folder increasing with any permanent removal of files from trash) came before or after bringing the portable hardrive into the picture.

I saw a lot of talk about CCC and how in some cases it actually restored some free space for some people. The problem I'm facing is, I can't install any new applications because my free space is practically nothing. I can't even keep my outlook app open (requires 150mb).

There's a whole lot more steps I took to resolve this issue that I have not included to spare you the detail, but feel free to ask and I'm happy to share.

I'm to a point of just wiping it and attempting a fresh restore, but would love to hear any other suggestions if a restore isn't necessary.

@casperes1996 and @mikecwest (pinging you two as you seemed to be fantastic resources )


jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ df -H
/dev/disk1s5 251G 11G 81M 100% 487499 2447613821 0% /
devfs 348k 348k 0B 100% 1176 0 100% /dev
/dev/disk1s1 251G 238G 81M 100% 2282307 2445819013 0% /System/Volumes/Data
/dev/disk1s4 251G 1.1G 81M 94% 2 2448101318 0% /private/var/vm
map auto_home 0B 0B 0B 100% 0 0 100% /System/Volumes/Data/home
map -fstab 0B 0B 0B 100% 0 0 100% /System/Volumes/Data/Network/Servers


jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *251.0 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 314.6 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 250.7 GB disk0s2/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +250.7 GB disk1
Physical Store disk0s2
1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data 237.6 GB disk1s1
2: APFS Volume Preboot 84.0 MB disk1s2
3: APFS Volume Recovery 528.5 MB disk1s3
4: APFS Volume VM 1.1 GB disk1s4
5: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 11.2 GB disk1s5/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk2
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1
2: Apple_HFS Backup Plus 2.0 TB disk2s2

OK, so since you're using Time Machine, I am still tempted to believe we're looking at snapshots - the behaviour seems like it. How did you check for snapshots?

There are two commands that list slightly different kinds of snapshots:
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

and
diskutil ap listSnapshots /

If the data is considered purgeable by macOS you can also try and force a purge.
create an empty file like so (here placing it in Downloads, but anywhere is fine)
touch ~/Downloads/empty

And then just pump 0s into it
dd if=/dev/zero of=<fullPathToDownloads/empty> bs=1m

reason for the full path is that ~ as a shorthand for your User directory seems to be not understood by dd. - In any case, that empty file will quickly grow in size, and may grow so quickly that with your limited storage, the command will fail before you know it, otherwise just cancel it after a bit with ctrl+c. - Now delete that file with rm and see if the space is recovered.
Though be warned, since space from other files isn't recovered there is a risk that this could eat up your last space if it does not recover any at all

 

[allan.nyholm]

Easiest way is just to download the OnyX application and have it list all Time Machine snapshots and delete those suckers. The Time Machine helper/whatever doesn't clean mine like it says it will. I don't know why, since I have Time Machine set up and always connected.. using a program interface that handles all this is a million times better than fiddling about in Terminal. Terminal is good for other stuff.

 

[JoJoBee88]

OK, so since you're using Time Machine, I am still tempted to believe we're looking at snapshots - the behaviour seems like it. How did you check for snapshots?

I completely agree with you! Everything I've read about other people having similar issues, were resolved by deleting their local snapshots. I'm half wondering if I'm doing something wrong in the sense that I may not be looking in the right places. Here is what I'm finding when doing the recommended commands. Do you see anything I can be doing differently that might allow me to find any hidden snapshots?

Mac HD BSD - device node : disk1s5 (11.2 GB )
MAC HD Data - BSD device node : disk1s1 (237.6 GB)
Backup Plus - BSD device node : disk2s2

tmutil listlocalsnapshots / attempts:
jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
Snapshots for volume group containing disk /:

jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Macintosh HD
Usage: tmutil listlocalsnapshots <mount_point>

jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Macintosh HD - Data
Usage: tmutil listlocalsnapshots <mount_point>

jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Backup Plus
Usage: tmutil listlocalsnapshots <mount_point>


diskutil ap listSnapshots / attempts:
jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ diskutil ap listSnapshots /
No snapshots for disk1s5

jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ diskutil apfs listSnapshots disk1s1
No snapshots for disk1s1

If the data is considered purgeable by macOS you can also try and force a purge.
create an empty file.....
Though be warned, since space from other files isn't recovered there is a risk that this could eat up your last space if it does not recover any at all

I'm a tad nervous to bring ANY additional storage onto my mac as I currently only have 47.8mb of free space. Have you found success by doing this in the past?

 

[JoJoBee88]

Easiest way is just to download the OnyX application and have it list all Time Machine snapshots and delete those suckers. The Time Machine helper/whatever doesn't clean mine like it says it will. I don't know why, since I have Time Machine set up and always connected.. using a program interface that handles all this is a million times better than fiddling about in Terminal. Terminal is good for other stuff.

I wish! I can't install anything with the state my computer is in right now (47.8 mb of free space). So I'm limited to the tools I have accessible as is.

 

[Nermal]

I've seen the same sorts of things on my new iMac with OS 10.15. I had 800 GB free, created 200 GB of temporary files, and deleted them. Finder then showed 600 GB free, but About This Mac showed 800. As I created more temp files, the Finder-reported free space count decreased, while About This Mac showed a figure that seemed to be consistent with reality. I never actually ran out of space: With Finder reporting 50 GB free and About This Mac reporting 700, I was able to create a 200 GB file.

A few days later I found that Finder was reporting 1.4 TB free on my 1 TB SSD.

I wrote all this up and logged a bug.

 

[casperes1996]

jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

This was the only version of the listlocalsnapshots command that was syntactically correct, as you can tell by the other attempts outputting the usage of the command - As you can see it directs you to the "mount point", but /Macintosh HD is not a mount point, for two reasons. 1) spaces are not allowed without "escaping them". So Macintosh HD inputted like that will be seen as two separate arguments to the command, one being /Macintosh, the other being HD. To include spaces you need to escape them with a backslash, so /Macintosh\ HD or put the whole thing in quotation marks.
Second, mounted volumes don't exist at the root /. They're in the /Volumes directory, so your backup drive will exist in /Volumes/Backup\ Plus

But as for the issue at hand that's not really important because if nothing was found at / the rest isn't really relevant.
Though I'm kinda unsure whether tmutil will list snapshots made from another user account if it's run from a logged in user, so you could try running it with sudo privileges;

sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

It will prompt for your password - it will not print the input characters but it is receiving your input.

I'm a tad nervous to bring ANY additional storage onto my mac as I currently only have 47.8mb of free space. Have you found success by doing this in the past?

I've heard success from people who have a lot of reported "purgeable" space that some installers and such don't properly clear when needed. Generally macOS is intended to automatically free up purgeable space when it becomes needed, but sometimes, files that need to reserve a lot of space all at ones can mess this process up and doing this process sometimes helps with that - but I'm not entirely sure it'd do anything for you since the behaviour does seem to be a bit different to those cases.

Do you have iCloud Photo Library turned on with a huge library? It could be that Optimised Storage is enabled and images are stored in a lower resolution but when you make more space available it just immediately uses up that space by downloading full res versions - though again behaviour seems a bit strange for that to be the culprit

 

[JoJoBee88]

I've seen the same sorts of things on my new iMac with OS 10.15. I had 800 GB free, created 200 GB of temporary files, and deleted them. Finder then showed 600 GB free, but About This Mac showed 800. As I created more temp files, the Finder-reported free space count decreased, while About This Mac showed a figure that seemed to be consistent with reality. I never actually ran out of space: With Finder reporting 50 GB free and About This Mac reporting 700, I was able to create a 200 GB file.

A few days later I found that Finder was reporting 1.4 TB free on my 1 TB SSD.

I wrote all this up and logged a bug.

I'm showing 47.8mb free out of 250.69 gb in Disk Utility and 47.8mb free of 250.69gb under "About this Mac" > Storage.

When you refer to "Finder", is that different than using Disk Utility?

 

[Nermal]

I didn't try Disk Utility so I don't know what it reported.

 

[JoJoBee88]

This was the only version of the listlocalsnapshots command that was syntactically correct, as you can tell by the other attempts outputting the usage of the command - As you can see it directs you to the "mount point", but /Macintosh HD is not a mount point, for two reasons. 1) spaces are not allowed without "escaping them". So Macintosh HD inputted like that will be seen as two separate arguments to the command, one being /Macintosh, the other being HD. To include spaces you need to escape them with a backslash, so /Macintosh\ HD or put the whole thing in quotation marks.
Second, mounted volumes don't exist at the root /. They're in the /Volumes directory, so your backup drive will exist in /Volumes/Backup\ Plus

This is super helpful! I want to make sure I'm doing everything accurately (even if it's not necessarily pertinent lol).

I do recall trying the \ method, however, it didn't seem to like it. I just tried the quotes method, and it didn't seem to like that way either. I must still be doing something wrong. The only way I got any sort of helpful result was using the diskutil apfs or ap listSnapshots [disk number: disk1s1 etc]

Without spaces after the forward slash:
jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /"Macintosh HD"
/Macintosh HD is not a valid disk

jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Macintosh\hd
/Macintoshhd is not a valid disk

With spaces after the forward and backward slash:
jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots / Macintosh\ HD
Usage: tmutil listlocalsnapshots <mount_point>

jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots / "Macintosh HD"
Usage: tmutil listlocalsnapshots <mount_point>

jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots / volumes/ backup\ plus
Usage: tmutil listlocalsnapshots <mount_point>

With no space after the forward and space after the backward slash:
jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ tmutil listlocalsnapshots /Macintosh\ hd
/Macintosh hd is not a valid disk

But as for the issue at hand that's not really important because if nothing was found at / the rest isn't really relevant.
Though I'm kinda unsure whether tmutil will list snapshots made from another user account if it's run from a logged in user, so you could try running it with sudo privileges;
sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
It will prompt for your password - it will not print the input characters but it is receiving your input.

jojobee88:~ jojobee88$ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
sudo: unable to write to /var/db/sudo/ts/jojobee88: No space left on device
Password:
Snapshots for volume group containing disk /:
jojobee88:~ jojobee88$

I'll also try just logging into the other users and run the command to triple check if there's any different results.

Do you have iCloud Photo Library turned on with a huge library? It could be that Optimised Storage is enabled and images are stored in a lower resolution but when you make more space available it just immediately uses up that space by downloading full res versions - though again behaviour seems a bit strange for that to be the culprit

I had disabled all cloud storage previously, as I believe a lot of the original storage that was clogging my disk space was from files on my cloud accounts (onedrive, icloud, google drive, etc). So currently I have all cloud services disabled and all file remnants removed from this computer (or so I thought). My Photo library storage is currently 5.4mb

I do have "optimized storage" enabled, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to disable it.

 

[JoJoBee88]

I didn't try Disk Utility so I don't know what it reported.

I think I see what you're talking about. In a Finder window, I right-click "Macintosh HD" and choose "Get Info". Unfortunately, the storage details match what I'm seeing in Disk Utility and About this Mac. I've also been monitoring the "Manage Storage" option accessible from the finder window with the same results. I was hoping I'd see what you were talking about, but it's frustratingly consistent across all storage details on my computer.