Running out of space can really hinder your computing: if you want your Mac to run smoothly, you need to make sure you always have something like 10 percent of your storage. So, in this article, we’ll walk you through the simple steps to help you free up space on your Mac. That 20GB of space is not freed until the snapshot is deleted.In the days of hard drives, we all had a lot of space on our Macs, but SSDs often have more limited capacity, and high-definition videos and other “important” files take up more space than ever.

You create a snapshot, then move 20GB of files to the Trash and empty the Trash. Suppose you have a 100GB hard drive with 80GB of content. However, because the snapshot retains references to every file on the volume, space is not freed when you delete a file. When you create a snapshot, the disk usage on the volume containing the snapshot remains unchanged. Initially, snapshots do not inherently consume space. Here is an article with some examples of how to view & delete APFS snapshots using the command line.įrom the Carbon Copy Cloner document found here, it explains about how APFS snapshots consume space: Snapshots and space concerns Deleting snapshots Here is an Apple article with limited information about APFS Time Machine snapshots. If snapshots are not being used, then the terminal command you used would be sufficient to remove the files. How can I free up some space?Ĭreating a snapshot of the APFS filesystem is near instantaneous and would be the first thing TM would do if the snapshot feature is enabled so it is possible TM created a snapshot. I do not have access to finder or anything like that in this very basic OS. terminal: I can list my files on the hard drive and I used rm -r to remove some files from my Documents folder (the backed up data that I had tried copying over when the system crashed), the deleted files are not shown by the ls command anymore, but the disk utility does not show any change in the free space on the disk after executing this command. disk utility: first aid finds no problem with the disk and disk utility shows 16 GB free space on the hard drive creating a bootable Mojave on a USB drive and booting from that - this works, but it is only a very basic system that only gives me a few options. booting Ubuntu from a USB drive - that works, but it no use, as Ubuntu can't read the APFS formatted hard drive. I recently performed a clean install of Mojave on my Mac, and when copying back the backed up data my disk filled up and the computer crashed.

Mac network drive free space