Where is all the disk space gone?

[kkinto]

I have Moneterey installed on a 1TB SSD. In disk utility it shows as 952 GB used. But there is no way I have that much stored on there (well, that I know about). CleanMyMacX shows there are nowhere near that GB of files.

About this mac shows a huge grey bar that has a tooltip that reads System Data 693 GB!

So whats exactly happening here?

CleanMyMac keeps giving notice that this drive is full but I cannot find where all the space is being taken up to clear it.

Can anyone help me recover the missing space please?
TIA

 

[Fishrrman]

Do you use time machine?
If so, could the space be consumed by "local snapshots"?

 

[Honza1]

What does the Diks Utility show below the screen you grabbed (first picture you attached) in APFS Snapshots on MantaRay? If there are any snapshots with large "Size" you can right click on them and Delete. This should remove the snapshot data and release some or all of the space they contain. I say should since sometimes the behavior is bit weird and takes little bit of time to propagate. Keep in mind, that SSD is really also computer on its own and deleting data is low priority job for it.

 

[Brian33]

What does the Diks Utility show below the screen you grabbed (first picture you attached) in APFS Snapshots on MantaRay?

To add to Honza1's idea -- in Disk Utility you need to select 'View-->Show APFS Snapshots' to see them.

Then you can optionally add the "Private Size" column (I think it's off by default) to see the real size of each snapshot. It's best to delete snapshots starting at the oldest first, though. If you delete one in the middle most of its size will be retained by older snapshots.

 

[HDFan]

You can run a utility such as DaisyDisk (scan as administrator) to see where the space has gone.

 

[kkinto]

Hi guys. Thanks - I have done as Honza1 and Brian33 suggested (took a bit of "huh? underneath?" till I read Brian33's post!)

It seems like its still calculating but this is the screenshot attached. It seems the culprit is Carbon Copy Cloner for most of the snapshots and the "private size" differs from the "size" so it seems the space is all hiding somewhere in there! I will have to get into the CCC docs to see what to do about this. Also I do use Time Machine but its snapshots seem a heck of a lot smaller.

Thanks for pointing the direction to a solution.

*EDIT : I deleted a bunch of snapshots via CCC but the space used is still over 91% so it seems nothing is gone yet. At most the space taken by these things seems to be no more than 60GB at most. Could this be just the SSD not showing anything deleted yet ?

>> OK - I installed a trial of Daisy Disk and after running the check it identified "735GB as 'Free and Purgeable'. Then I runt Disk Utility again and now it's showing 538GB Free! I think that will stop the 'drive almost full messages'.

Thanks for all the help!

 

[Fishrrman]

I use CCC.
One of the first things I did with CCC was to TURN OFF "local snapshots" -- I don't want them!

If you've deleted the snapshots, try a full shutdown, then reboot. Does that help?

I'd also get rid of those time machine local snapshots.
I've never used tm, not once, ever, so I'm not well-versed in it.
But I -think- you can use disk utility to delete the tm local snapshots.

 

[kkinto]

Thanks. I deleted them with CCC - I think there was quite a lag because the free space didn't come back immediately. But when checking in again I found a whole lot of it (almost 600GB) back! So somewhere between CCC and the system "free and purgeable" space lay the answer. And that annoying 'disk nearly full' message is gone now.
👍