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I had approx 50Gb of Windows VMs on my MacBook Pro internal SSD (128Gb) (OS X 10.7.3). I copied them to an external drive, then deleted them from the internal drive, then emptied the trash. When I look at disk usage in Activity Monitor it shows the same level of usage as it did prior to deleting c 50Gb of files. Any ideas why the space hasn't been freed up? |
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The answer relates to changes to Time Machine backups in Lion. My understanding is that when a TM back up is attempted when the back up disk is not connected, a back up is made in /Volumes/MobileBackups. These back ups do not go away the next time TM runs with the back up disk connected. I am not sure if the OS will eventually reclaim this space. You can disable the local back ups by running the following command: After you run this command /Volumes/MobileBackups is deleted. I'm sure there is a good reason for the local backups and I don't necessarily recommend disabling them, but they were - in combination with some large deleted folders - the cause of disk space appearing to be still in use. You can re-enable mobile backups by running: More info here - http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/18 |
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If you look the free disk space from finder it will not include the backups on space used. That is because backups will be deleted if more space is needed by other apps. What I do to keep the mobile backups working without taking much space, is disabling and enabling the time machine once per week (from TM prefs). When you disable it the local backups are deleted. I guess it wouldn't make much difference to just let the drive get full and then automatically delete backups as needed (maybe slightly slower performance?). |
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