I can’t even begin to explain why it rose by only 21 GB.
#Disk utility free space free
However, since I had been at 146 GB free before, I would have expected it to rise to 182 GB. I’m somewhat perturbed that it changed so significantly over five minutes, but it may take that long for APFS to recalculate. Regardless, when I selected all the snapshots and clicked the – button below the list, my free space number rose again, first to 163 GB (below left) and then, five minutes later, to 167 GB (below right). (By the time I took the screenshot below, I had already deleted two individual snapshots without making any difference in the amount of free space.) When I looked in Disk Utility, I had 24 snapshots, nominally consuming 36 GB. Nonetheless, I wanted to see what role those Time Machine snapshots played in the free space available on my drive. That’s good, I suppose, since his scenario was going to cause confusion for users. So, for whatever reason, I was not seeing what Howard Oakley was describing.
#Disk utility free space full
I can’t explain why it was a full gigabyte higher than would seem possible.
After a minute or so, the free space number did rise-as expected-but first to 148 GB (not shown) before settling down at 146 GB. I figured that if I emptied the Trash, I’d either see no change due to the Time Machine snapshot issue or have almost exactly 145 GB free. This morning, Get Info on my boot drive reported 137 GB free, and the Trash contained 7.6 GB. They’re about 2.5 GB each, and I put them in the Trash yesterday. I recently upgraded to V2 of the Affinity suite (see “ Consider Switching from Creative Cloud to Affinity V2,” 5 December 2022), but I hadn’t gotten around to trashing the earlier versions of the Affinity apps.
I decided to see if I could replicate some of these issues, at least in macOS 12 Monterey, which I’m still running on my 2020 27-inch iMac until I find the time to do a much-needed clean installation of macOS 13 Ventura. Howard Oakley examines the variables in “ Explainer: Disk free space,” and Jeff Carlson explains APFS in his Take Control of Your Digital Storage, Second Edition ebook. The complexity underlying APFS and macOS in general creates a situation where the amount of free space isn’t entirely deterministic. I’ve been pondering just how difficult-perhaps impossible-it is to know how much free space you actually have on a Mac’s drive these days (see “ Ensure Sufficient Free Space before Upgrading to Ventura,” 15 November 2022 and “ iPhones and iPads Now Require a Passcode on Every Backup/Sync,” 11 January 2023). (Still other backup apps, such as Arq and Backblaze, don’t use APFS snapshots but consume significant amounts of space for caching purposes-that’s getting some discussion in TidBITS Talk right now.) Time Machine has no such options, but you can delete the snapshots manually in Disk Utility. Oakley says that some backup apps use a similar approach-he calls out Carbon Copy Cloner-but unlike Time Machine, such apps generally provide options to disable the feature, change how long snapshots are retained, and delete the snapshots if you need the space right away.
Because one of those snapshots contains the very large file, you may not get the space back until a full day later, when Time Machine has deleted those snapshots to make way for new ones. The reason, he says, is that Time Machine works by making APFS snapshots of your entire drive on every backup and retaining those for 24 hours. In it, he points out that deleting a very large file to free up space doesn’t necessarily have the desired effect, at least right away.
#Disk utility free space how to
Howard Oakley’s explanations of the underpinnings of macOS are always interesting, but his latest post on his Eclectic Light Company blog, “ How to get the Trash working properly,” particularly drew my attention.
#1671: Apple Q3 2023 earnings, new Beats headphones and earbuds, Stage Manager adoption rate, do you use Spotlight?.
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