This can be a MacBook Professional with Apple M2 Professional, 500GB SSD, working Tahoe 26.2.
TL;DR
My System Information is at 350GB. Each time I delete a big file to release some area, as an alternative of free disk area, I get a rise in System Information and I can not discover something on my disk that’s actually utilizing up all that area.
The Background
A few weeks in the past, Mac OS instructed me, that I am working out of disk area. Did not assume a lot of it, went forward and freed about 40GB by deleting outdated Downloads which have amassed over time.
Per week or 2 later, my laborious drive was full once more, this time I grew to become a bit extra suspicious, so I took a more in-depth look. My System Information was at 250GB. I assumed that was quite a bit. Did not have time to research additional, so I deleted native snapshots of recordsdata I had in cloud storage. Since these are saved underneath ~/Library/CloudStorage/, I guessed these 60GB the place additionally a part of the 250GB System Information and I ought to have purchased myself a while.
Per week later, I am having the identical subject once more, My drive is just too full to obtain updates and even end a Time Machine Backup. So I opened up System Settings, and checked out my Storage and naturally System Information was again at 260GB. First I checked if my cloud storage had generated native snapshots, however these are within the very low MB-range, in order that wasn’t it.
To briefly free some area, I moved my hardly ever used Parallels VM to an exterior disk and the weirdest factor occurred: My Paperwork Utilization went down 80GB and on the identical time System Information Utilization went up 70GB.
Proper now System information is at 350GB and I virtually don’t have anything left I can transfer off the disk to free more room.
My Investigation
I attempted to research: My ~/Library/ is about 92GB, about 66GB of that are ~/Library/Utility Assist/ (about 50GB of these are from the wallpaper-videos, so that’s one disk-hog, however there should be extra). So the place are these different 260GB? I additionally tried some shell instruments to seek out no matter is clogging my disk. df would not appear to work and du tells me, that I’ve used 392GB (in comparison with the 480 System settings declare for use) and I am sure, it counted my 100GB Customers listing twice (as soon as as /Customers/ and as soon as as /System/Volumes/Information/Customers/, so it is really solely 290GB which might be used in my view.
This is the (abbreviated) output of du:
$ sudo du -h -d4 / | kind -h
[...]
27G /System/Volumes/Preboot
41G /Functions
41G /System/Volumes/Information/Functions
62G /Customers/xxx/Library/Utility Assist
82G /Customers/xxx/Library
105G /System/Volumes/Information/Customers
105G /Customers
105G /Customers/xxx
177G /System/Volumes/Information
204G /System/Volumes
217G /System
392G /
You’ll be able to clearly see, how the Customers listing is counted twice, how there’s actually nothing substantial bigger than 25GB.
Easy methods to repair?
So, how am I going to repair this subject?
What’s the subject anyway?
Is du proper and my disk is not full in any respect? Then why does Mac OS assume in any other case? Or is Mac OS proper? Then the place is that lacking disk area? There are fairly a couple of folders the place du tells me “Operation not permitted” which I discover unusual as a result of I used sudo, however I suppose that could possibly be commonplace OSX behaviour and even when it isn’t it is in all probability past the scope of this query, however possibly these lacking 200GB are hidden someplace there, so how can I discover them?