How To Clean Up Lost Disk Space in MacOS High Sierra

Author: erics, Posted October 12th, 2017 at 10:17:46am

Reposted from https://mcbguru.blog/2017/10/12/macos-high-sierra-disk-space/

The new APFS creates snapshots during local Time Machine backups, and this can mean, especially if you’be been dealing with some large files, that when you delete them and empty the wastebasket, you don’t get your disk space back.
The key is to look at your local backups, and the easiest method for that is the tmutil command. In particular, check the list of local snapshots:

These are normally managed automatically using a combination of the date/age of the backup and the space they are using compared to how much disk space you need. All this happens automatically in the background for you.
But, if you’ve just done some house cleaning, or you’ve come back from using a lot of disk space and want to free it up, you’ll need to get rid of those old snapshots. You can do them individually using:
$ tmutil deletelocalsnapshots
But it’s easier to just purge the snapshots and specify how many you many want to get rid of. That will leave you with some recent snapshots but still recover some diskspace, for that, use this command:
$ tmutil thinlocalsnapshots [purgeamount] [urgency]
That [purgeamount] is how much space you want to recover in the process, and the [urgency] is a number (1-4) of how quickly you want the space recovered. Both are optional.
For me, I just ran the thinning and that left me with:

Categories: How-To's, Technology Tags: APFS, backup, Disk, Disk Space, High Sierra, howto, MacOS, Sierra, Snapshot, Space, Time Machine, tips, tmutil