MacBook Pro M2 16", 1TB of files removed but disk space not freed

[Macshroomer]

Hi,

I am archiving some jobs off of my 16" M2 MacBook Pro running Ventura 13.2.1 this evening and not seeing the space freed up once deleted.

I just moved 1.1TB of files from my 4TB drive and even after two shut down and restarts it still shows the same disk space used on the icon, in disk utility and when highlighting the drive icon and hitting command "I". WTF is going on here, I have a flight to catch tomorrow AM and I need the space for an out of town job, never had this happen before.

Any ideas what could be happening?

 

[smirking]

Go to Apple Menu > About this Mac > More Info > Storage Settings

That should give you a more accurate view of how much free space you have. The normal overview disk free always lags behind recent changes.

Try a program like OmniDiskSweeper if you want to inspect a specific directory to get an accurate up to the moment file size for folders.

 

[Macshroomer]

Go to Apple Menu > About this Mac > More Info > Storage Settings

That should give you a more accurate view of how much free space you have. The normal overview disk free always lags behind recent changes.

Try a program like OmniDiskSweeper if you want to inspect a specific directory to get an accurate up to the moment file size for folders.

This was accurate but not even that readout registered the 1.17TB of new free space until about 10 minutes. From now on I will just expect this system to show the new free space slower than other machines I have used when deleting large blocks of data.

 

[Nermal]

It's actually a bit worse than that: It doesn't free the space immediately, but rather queues it for delete. For example, imagine you want to copy a 250 GB file but only have 200 GB free. You delete 100 GB worth of stuff (which should take your free space to 300 GB), then copy the 250 GB file... and it gets 200 GB into it then fails with an "out of space" error. Wait half an hour and try it again, and it works fine.

This never used to happen. It started in maybe OS 10.15 (I logged a bug in the 10.15 timeframe, at least, which Apple never commented on) but in earlier releases the space was freed immediately.

 

[smirking]

You delete 100 GB worth of stuff (which should take your free space to 300 GB), then copy the 250 GB file... and it gets 200 GB into it then fails with an "out of space" error. Wait half an hour and try it again, and it works fine.

That's terrible. This really happens? I just assume that when Disk Utility shows some of the disk space as purgeable and includes that slice of space in its "available space" report that it'll let me overwrite those blocks at will.

 

[Nermal]

Having referred back to my bug report, I was actually doing a video render, where the exact size of the file is unknown until the process is complete (but I can make an educated guess and free up enough space). A straight copy may not exhibit this issue, as the OS would presumably purge the "deleted" files in advance, knowing how much space is required.