help recovering disk space. system taking up 200GB

[shulzach]

past few days my MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) running mojave 10.14.3 has been slow and overheating. i then realized a new os version came out and maybe i needed to update. i tried to update and my mac has run out of storage (4 GB free disk space remaining) and my system was taking up approx 200GB .. not sure exactly what to do, i did a little reading online and realized i had no backed up my laptop in a while. So i plugged in my external drive and saw it was running out of space. I then decided to take my sisters external drive (which she doesnt use anymore) and do a full backup. for some reason i can run a backup till about halfway (which takes hours) and then for no apparent reason the TM backup stops running and no Macintosh HD folder is created (it remains a inProgress file) .. i tried to delete everything on this external drive (so i can backup my mac and hopefully resolve this disk storage issue) .. but my trash can just crashes or stays on "emptying files" forever. i also at one point got an error message saying something like cannot delete because DocumentRevisions-V100 is running .. so i did a bit more reading and came across some of these forms on macruomrs. so i thought id post and give you guys a shot.

also on a sidenote... i rarely use terminal but im pretty sure this message "you have new mail in var/mail/Zach" can't be normal. so i guess 2 problems.. any help would be much appreciated.
thanks in advance.


what do i do next?
heres where im at.....

Last login: Tue Mar 26 21:10:13 on console

You have new mail.

ZachMacBookPro:~ Zach$ tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates / |grep 20|while read f; do tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $f; done

ZachMacBookPro:~ Zach$ sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /

Password:

1 /home

2 /usr

1 /.Spotlight-V100

1 /net

0 /.PKInstallSandboxManager-SystemSoftware

1 /bin

0 /Network

1 /sbin

10 /Library

9 /System

1 /.fseventsd

4 /private

5 /.DocumentRevisions-V100

0 /.vol

187 /Users <<<<< seems to be where my problem is coming from?

8 /Applications

1 /dev

0 /Volumes

0 /cores

222 /

222 total

You have new mail in /var/mail/Zach

ZachMacBookPro:~ Zach$

 

[nouveau_redneck]

A tool like DaisyDisk will hone down on where the space is being used in seconds. Available from the App Store. It will display both a graphical and menu hierarchy that you can sort by space used, expand to drill down to see what is consuming the space.

 

[Fishrrman]

Download DiskWave from here:
https://diskwave.barthe.ph
It's small in size and free.

Open DiskWave and go to the preferences.
Put a checkmark in "show invisible files".
Close preferences.

The DiskWave window shows you in plain English what is using space on all your drives.
Click on any drive.
Now, you'll see what's ON the drive, listed in order of "largest to smallest".
You can easily locate what's eating up your space.

What is it?