After installing MacOS Catalina 10.15 Beta (19A471t) there is something taking up 90GB of my Disk. I tried scanning with Daisy Disk but wasn't able to identify what those files are.
How can I find out this folder?
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This seems to have worked fine for me, but there are no guarantees. DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT A BACKUP OF YOUR DATA. Then again, you know that, you voluntarily installed a beta operating system. 😜
The root of this issue seems to be a failure in deleting APFS snapshots made by Time Machine. Under healthy operation, old snapshots are deleted as necessary whenever new disk space is required. However, this process failed, as we'll see below.
Firstly, I would try to manually thin out the Time Machine snapshots. This requests Time Machine to automatically clean out enough snapshots to free a desired amount of space, in this case, 100 GB.
$ tmutil thinlocalsnapshots 100g 1
If this succeeded, it should say something like
Thinned local snapshots:
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-21-141250.local
Listing some number of deleted snapshots. However, I doubt this will help. If the system could get this to work automatically, I don't see why manually invoking it would help. But YMMV, so it's worth a shot.
After some number of snapshots were deleted, some space was freed up, but not much. the issue is that deleting any number of snapshots won't matter if even one snapshot exists holding onto the same data. In my case, there were two snapshots remaining that persisted even after thinning:
$ tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates
Snapshot dates for all disks:
2019-06-11-214224
2019-06-21-233121
I tried manually deleting these:
$ sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2019-06-21-233121
Deleted local snapshot '2019-06-21-233121'
$ sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2019-06-11-214224
Deleted local snapshot '2019-06-11-214224'
The response says they were deleted, but they actually weren't:
$ tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates
Snapshot dates for all disks:
2019-06-11-214224
2019-06-21-233121
At this point, I start going the nuclear route: directly using diskutil
to delete the APFS snapshots, without Time Machine's blessing to do so. First, I listed the APFS snapshots to see their UUIDs:
$ sudo diskutil apfs listSnapshots /System/Volumes/Data
Snapshots for disk1s1 (2 found)
|
+-- BFD78F4F-99BB-4D5B-AE16-5367DC9C615E
| Name: com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-11-214224.local
| XID: 10440723
| Purgeable: Yes
|
+-- 611E5357-8D10-4ABE-95F3-BE98C2DFCA3F
Name: com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-21-233121.local
XID: 10492913
Purgeable: Yes
NOTE: This snapshot limits the minimum size of APFS Container disk1
Then I tried deleting them manually:
$ sudo diskutil apfs deleteSnapshot disk1s1 -uuid BFD78F4F-99BB-4D5B-AE16-5367DC9C615E
Deleting APFS Snapshot BFD78F4F-99BB-4D5B-AE16-5367DC9C615E "com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-11-214224.local" from APFS Volume disk1s1
Started APFS operation
Error: -69863: Insufficient privileges
Strangely, even though I'm using sudo
to run the command as root, I'm told I have insufficient privileges. This might have something to do with the read-onliness of the system volume, or to do with it being the actively booted volume, but I don't know.
I loaded up into recovery mode, and went to the command line. From there, I did a similar process to try to delete the snapshots. However, this required first unlocking and mounting the relevant volumes.
Running diskutil list
, I found that my data and system volumes were assigned the labels disk1s1
and disk2s5
, respectively.
I think (I don't remember precisely) unlocked the volumes with:
-bash-3.2# diskutil apfs unlockVolume disk1s1
Password:
-bash-3.2# diskutil apfs unlockVolume disk1s5
Password:
Then I mounted them:
-bash-3.2# diskutil mount disk1s1
-bash-3.2# diskutil mount disk1s5
I listed their snapshots:
-bash-3.2# diskutil apfs listSnapshots disk2s1
Snapshots for disk2s1 (2 found)
|
+-- Name: com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-11-214224.local
| XID: 10440723
|
+-- Name: com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-21-233121.local
XID: 10492913
NOTE: This snapshot sets the minimal allowed size of APFS Container disk2
-bash-3.2# diskutil apfs listSnapshots disk2s5
Snapshot for disk2s5 (2 found)
|
+-- Name: com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-11-214224.local
| XID: 187251
|
+-- Name: com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-21-233121.local
XID: 10492911
NOTE: This snapshot sets the minimal allowed size of APFS Container disk2
I tried deleting the snapshots by their "XID", but that didn't seem to work for all of them, so I instead deleted them by name:
-bash-3.2# diskutil apfs deleteSnapshot disk2s1 -name com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-11-214224.local
Deleting APFS Snapshot XID 10440723 "com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-11-214224.local" from APFS Volume disk2s1
Started APFS operation
Finished APFS operation
-bash-3.2# diskutil apfs deleteSnapshot disk2s1 -name com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-21-233121.local
Deleting APFS Snapshot XID 10492913 "com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-21-233121.local" from APFS Volume disk2s1
Started APFS operation
Finished APFS operation
-bash-3.2# diskutil apfs deleteSnapshot disk2s5 -name com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-11-214224.local
Deleting APFS Snapshot XID 187251 "com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-11-214224.local" from APFS Volume disk2s5
Started APFS operation
Finished APFS operation
-bash-3.2# diskutil apfs deleteSnapshot disk2s5 -name com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-21-233121.local
Deleting APFS Snapshot XID 10492911 "com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-06-21-233121.local" from APFS Volume disk2s5
Started APFS operation
Finished APFS operation
Once this was done, I confirmed that the snapshots were gone:
-bash-3.2# diskutil apfs listSnapshots disk2s1
No snapshots for disk2s1
-bash-3.2# diskutil apfs listSnapshots disk2s5
No snapshots for disk2s5
And I confirmed that the space was in fact freed with diskutil apfs list
.
I restarted, and my Mac was back to normal. The space of all of the files I previously deleted is now visible and available.
And they lived happily ever after...
Did you tell the installer to go ahead and copy any of your user data to the newly installed system? If yes, it's probably worth checking for expanded sparse files or sparse bundles/disk images. - Depending on the wisdom of the copying program, sparse files or bundles might have gotten expanded to their full glory, and take up "real" disk space now. Good candidates for sparse files on MacOS are sparse disk images, where the "room for expansion" got reserved during creation, but wasn't supposed to be taking up any space until filled with data. A simple copy can expand it as well...
To identify large files to inspect, you could use find
:
find / -type f -size +2G -ls
would list every file exceeding a 2 GB threshold.
if you want the output sorted by the size of those files, just add sort, and tell it to take the 7th column and display the results largest first (head
further limits the output to the largest 20 of the bunch, to keep you from getting spammed):
find / -type f -size +2G -ls | sort -k7 -r |head -20
Given the amount of space you're wondering about, chances are that this search would pop up the culprit. If it's something that was copied over from another installation, you could compare the space the file "really" takes up on disk by running du -sh </path/to/file>
for both files. If it's smaller on the source side, re-copy it with a tool that keeps sparse files intact.
To identify by directory:
If you're more of a visual person, you could use a graphic tool to display the space taken up by directories, and drill down from there:
Unfortunately (as you've experienced) those tools only give a vague idea where large files may lie in hiding, but those can often serve as starting point for the commandline-based examinations.
If you prefer to examine the directories from the command line, you can find the large ones using find
and du
:
find / -type d -exec du -sh {} \; |grep "G "
("G "
needs to be entered as Gcrtl-v<tab>
to search for G<tab>
) will list out all directories which are at least one G in size. Note that this will sum up nested directories several times depending on their nesting level (it will sum up /usr, /usr/local /usr/local/bin /usr/local/etc without trying to optimize the process).It'd be interesting to hear back from you when you've identified the culprit!
sudo
prepended to the command in question, for example sudo ls -l <path to folder>
. The password sudo
will ask for is the one belonging to your (administrative) user account.
Jun 18, 2019 at 17:46
xdu
which rendered some graphical output from running the du
command recursively and saving the output to a file, the result looking somewhat similar to Disk Inventory X
.
Jun 18, 2019 at 17:52
I have many Apps on my system but my ~/Library folder tales up almost 100 GB. I suggest you check your library folder for the size. recall there are 2 library folders. one in your home directory and one on the same level as users or Application folder. Make sure you are showing hidden items then select your Library folder in the Finder and "Get Info"
It's worth saying that MacOS's Storage breakdown has traditionally been unreliable. As you're running beta software, make sure you report it to Apple.
Is the Finder reporting a similar amount of used/free space? If you have backups of iOS devices, like phones and iPads, these can take up large amounts of space. They used to be managed in iTunes, but this will have changed in Catalina.
@Alexander @Mane Manero
As the tmutil
usages shown:
Usage: tmutil deletelocalsnapshots [<mount_point> | <snapshot_date>]
You should feel free to delete snapshots using this command without sudo
and recovery mode
:
➜ ~ tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /System/Volumes/Data
Deleted 5 Time Machine local snapshots for volume group containing disk '/System/Volumes/Data'
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-09-234112.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-09-200334.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-09-220434.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-09-210802.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-10-10-162541.local
Found... macOS Catalina File System Changes: Auto Generated Multiple Files as swapfile (AnyNumber) of 1.07GB under HD > Private > var > VM
You can view hidden files in Finder by pressing : ⌘ Command ⇧ Shift .
Trimming / did not work for me on Catalina, /System/Volumes/Data worked for me
Check you disk space:
MacBook-Pro-2152:~ derek$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1s5 466Gi 14Gi 36Gi 28% 478195 4881974685 0% /
devfs 227Ki 227Ki 0Bi 100% 789 0 100% /dev
/dev/disk1s1 466Gi 414Gi 36Gi 92% 3238291 4879214589 0% /System/Volumes/Data
/dev/disk1s4 466Gi 1.0Gi 36Gi 3% 1 4882452879 0% /private/var/vm
map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /System/Volumes/Data/home
Trim the snapshots by ~10Gb
MacBook-Pro-2152:~ derek$ sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots /System/Volumes/Data 10000000000 4
Thinned local snapshots:
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-08-08-014223.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-08-08-095414.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-08-08-105804.local
Confirm the free space
MacBook-Pro-2152:~ derek$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1s5 466Gi 14Gi 47Gi 23% 478195 4881974685 0% /
devfs 227Ki 227Ki 0Bi 100% 789 0 100% /dev
/dev/disk1s1 466Gi 403Gi 47Gi 90% 3238291 4879214589 0% /System/Volumes/Data
/dev/disk1s4 466Gi 1.0Gi 47Gi 3% 1 4882452879 0% /private/var/vm
map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /System/Volumes/Data/home
Before attempting the nuclear option, I found an article that helped. Of note, trimming did not work for me (which is why I'm assuming we're hitting this problem).
Per this link, you can list your local backups:
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /System/Volumes/Data
The result was
$tmutil listlocalsnapshots /System/Volumes/Data
Snapshots for volume group containing disk /System/Volumes/Data:
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-08-31-171636.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-08-31-184648.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-09-01-073333.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-09-01-083316.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-09-01-100431.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-09-01-110546.local
com.apple.TimeMachine.2019-09-01-120530.local
Then run tmutil deletelocalsnapshots
with the date and number to delete each one. Do one a time:
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2019-08-31-184648
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2019-08-31-184648
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2019-09-01-073333
...
After this, it took about 2 minutes and my computer reported 50GB free.
for snapshot in $(tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates | grep 20); do sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $snapshot; done
Apr 2, 2020 at 15:24
Manage
reveal? Go to Documents-> File Browser and wait for sometime to get the app to reveal sizes of each folder.